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SUMMER SCI-FI MOVIE PREVIEW!

WILLIAM

Alien Encounter

GREGORY

Future

ON MARS:

By Geoffrey A. Landis

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Science,
fiction Age

FICTION

36 Frank’s Tricer Run

By Ernest Hogan

Bull fighting was so old fashioned. The only worthy
challenge for Frank Lazaro was a herd of Triceratops.

COVER: A massive
generation starship
continues on its
endless voyage ,
courtesy of artist
John Berkey
ABOVE: A scene
from the big screen
adaptation of
Robert A. Heinlein’s
classic novel
Starship Troopers.

DEPARTMENTS

8 Editorial

You have spoken, and it’s time to report on your
favorite fiction of 1996.

12 Letters

Readers come out of the closet and admit their love of
both SF and sci-fi.

14 BOOKS BY DI FILIPPO, FRATZ AND
RUSSELL

Asimov’s greatest creation lives on in the pages of
Gregory Benford’s Foundation's Fear.

22 Movies by dan perez

This summer’s blockbuster sci-fi flicks bring us Men In
Black, Starship Troopers, The Lost World and more.

43 ECOPOIESIS

By Geoffrey A. Landis

They came from Earth to solve a senseless murder.

But once on Mars, all they wanted was to stay alive.

60 Your Eyes, My Darling,
Black and White and Blue

By Karen Haber

The explorer from Earth came in search of new won-
ders, never expecting to find the true meaning of love.

66 The Sunhouse Trap

By George Walker

The far future will be so different from today as to be
almost unrecognizable. But in many fundamental ways,
nothing will have changed at all.

26 Alternative Media

Hot tips on the best new SF comics, collectibles,
Internet sites and more.

32 SCIENCE by ARLAN ANDREWS and
GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

The new discovery of ice on the Moon may allow us to
explore the rest of our solar system.

86 Gallery by lewis shiner

Rock and Roll will never die — but then, neither will
science fiction.

92 GAMES by JEREMY bloom

A tour of the recent Consumer Electronics Show
reveals a brand new dimension in gaming.

98 INTERNET by cory doctorow

As you prepare to cybersurf the World Wide Web, we
continue to bring you the online hot spots.

70 The Voice

By Gregory Benford

Without the Voice, there came a choice. Klair hoped
she had the strength to make the right one.

76 Broca’s Choice

By Mark W. Tiedemann
Evan Borik thought he had escaped from the prison
planet of his birth. He was about to learn that the uni-
verse held more than one type of prison.

82 The Firefly Tree

By Jack Williamson

The tree tickled the sky, sizzled with a strange new
life, and told him there was a place where things could
be better.

SCIENCE FICTION AGE (ISSN #1065-1829) is published bimonthly by Sovereign Media Co., Inc., 441 Carlisle Drive, Herndon, VA 20170 (703) 471-1550. Periodical Rate postage paid at Herndon, VA, and additional mail-
ing offices. SCIENCE FICTION AGE, Volume 5, Number 4 01997 by Sovereign Media, all rights reserv ed. Copyrights to stories and illustrations are the property of their creators. The opinions expressed in Science
Fiction Age are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sovereign Media. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner.
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guidelines. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Science Fiction Age, P.O. Box 710, Mt. Morris, IL 01054

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Editorial

Thank you for choosing
your favorite fiction of 1996.

W fe BOTH LIKE TIME TRAVELLING
through the pages of maga-
zines, you and I. That’s why
we meet in these pages every
two months. (I might even be
coming into your home more frequently than
that if you also read Sci-Fi Entertainment,
the other Sovereign Media title that I edit,
which visits readers on its own nine-times-
per-year schedule.) What I’ve never told you
before is that I time travel in more than one
direction. Not only do I voyage into the far-
flung future in these pages, but when I am
functioning as a reader, and not as an editor,
I also use magazines to travel into the almost
unimaginable past.

While I like to haunt the newsstands
searching for news of the next big thing as
much as anyone, I also eryoy dipping into yes-
terday's news, courtesy of magazines that
were published in the days before even my
grandparents were bom.

For example, today’s science fact and sci-
ence fiction both become even more astound-
ing when one considers the new scientific
advances that were announced in the pages
of the June 1899 issue of The Strand Maga-
zine, which proclaimed in an article titled
“The Newest Flying Machine” that “we are
near the practical solution of the great prob-
lem of a man being able to fly.”

On an athletic note, Elbert Hubbard, writ-
ing in the March 1903 issue of The Cos-
mopolitan, bemoaned the fact that “in a sea-
son of three months past, twenty-one men
have been killed playing football,” and
demonstrates for today’s Superbowl-crazed
populace just how much the public percep-
tion of the most popular sport has changed
in the ensuing nine decades by going on to
state that “football and hazing spring from the
same savage soil. Both are found only in edu-
cational institutions. ... The practical world
has no use for football. The game will have to
go, and its passing will not be regretted....”
But the most useful time machine for me as
an editor came about in the pages of the pre-
mier issue of The Na tional Magazine, which
debuted in July 1852. Abel Stevens, hopeful
editor of a new magazine in a time when even
then there already seemed to be too many of
them, sent me this useful message from 145
years in the past. Contemplating the works he
was about to present before the public, he
wrote on behalf of his staff, “In adding another
publication to what they acknowledge to be
the already superabundant literature of the
times, it will be their endeavor to mitigate the

evils of this excess by winnowing the wheat
from the chaff — by rendering their work a
repository of only the selectest articles.”
Tilings haven’t changed at all in the ensuing
decades. Editors still must separate the wheat
from tire chaff, and I have personally read tens
of thousands of manuscripts to find for you tire
very best. Once a year, however, it’s your turn
to choose — and not just the best, but the best
of the best. Your postcards have swamped our
offices since we asked you to choose your
favorite novellas, novelettes and short stories
of 1996, and here is what you told us:

Your choice for favorite novella was:
“Immersion” by Gregory Benford: This
March tale of a future economist being
hunted by terrorists while hiding within the
mind of a chimpanzee was a riveting thriller.
We’re pleased to learn that it will be reprinted
in The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

For novelette, you chose:

“The Compassionate Smothering-Death
of the Universe” by Kandis Elliot: Readers
in May were treated to Interrogator Regal
Ket’s ethical dilemma in this chilling portrait
of betrayal in a vast Galactic Coalition.

Since short stories make up the bulk of our
fiction, we present the top three vote-getters:
“The Lady Vanishes” by Charles
Sheffield: This November story of covert sci-
ence that brought The Invisible Man to mod-
em times (and made her a woman) was far
and away your favorite short story of the year.

“The Death of a Star” by Jack Williamson:
Like fine wine, this Grandmaster gets better
with age. His first tale was published in 1928.
Seven decades later, his November story could
still rank as your second favorite of the year.

“A Chicago Dinner Party, Sometime
After” by W. Gregory Stewart: This proved
to be the most controversial choice. While
some readers complained about this Novem-
ber picture of tire frrture (see Letters column
for one example), enough of you adored it to
make it the year’s third most popular story.

As we promised, three postcards have been
pulled at random from tire overflowing mound,
and the following readers will each be sent a
box of assorted recent books and prepublica-
tion galleys. Thank you, Carl Cipra, Alexander
Flipse, and Cheryl Olson for your help.

Now we can say that 1996 is officially over.
I hope you’re er\joying 1997. Please pay atten-
tion, so you’ll be ready for next year’s voting.
It’s important! You never know — someone
100 years in the future may need your opinion
to do a little time travelling of their own.

Scott Edelman

Science,
fiction Age

VOLUME 5

NUMBER 4

MARK HINTZ
Publisher

CARL A. GNAM, JR.
Editorial Director
SCOTT EDELMAN
Editor

STEPHEN VANN
Art Director

DEBBIE MOLIS
PATRICIA A. ALLEN
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CAROLE R. PASCOE
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ELISABETH FRUTOZO
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Contributors:

Arlan Andrews, Ray Aldridge, Eric T.
Baker, Michael Bishop, Ben Bova, Adam-
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Craig Shaw Gardner, Connie Hirsch, A1
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Lunsford, Barry Malzberg, Resa Nelson,
Allen Steele, Martha Soukup, Charles
Sheffield, Don Webb, Michael Whelan.

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Letters

Mr. Edelman:

I have been reading Science Fiction for
more than fifty years, and I have read every-
one from Anderson (can’t think of a lower “A”
just offhand) to Zelazny (can’t think of a
higher “Z") — hard core, soft core, social,
utopic, dystopic, etc. — and some that are
just called “Fiction” (Tom Clancy, Robin
Cook, Michael Crichton, Bill Buchanan)
because they did not wish to get “locked into”
the SF genre (probably wise). I have er\joyed,
literally, thousands of books, short stories,
novelettes, etc., but for pure relaxation, I
always go to Sci-Fi. My mind can soar to
those places that only exist in my (or some-
one’s) imagination — among the stars.

Like you, I like the whole spectrum, be it
Science Fiction, SF, Sci-Fi, Spec Fic or skiffy
and easily find common ground with any of
the “purists.”

I’ve very rarely used the term Spec Fic and
never skiffy, but I do like SF the best. Why?
Because it can also mean Science Fantasy,
but I’m not prejudiced about any of the other
terms. I cannot understand why anyone
should be the least bit upset about terms that
mean virtually the same thing.

As for the fiction:

“End City” by Phyllis Gotlieb: Now here is
an intriguing thought. If we were blessed
(cursed?) with psi abilities, such as these, I
feel confident that our rates of murder, sui-
cide, divorce and incidence of war would go
sky high! I really liked the part when Sheleen
ran into the creche. She was able to calm the
babies and was in return calmed by them.
(And I was calmed from the ongoing excite-
ment!) Yes, some of us men have a mothering
instinct, too. Kudos to Ms. Gotlieb; well
thought out and written — thank you.

“What Would You Like to Know?” by
Charles Sheffield: If you knew you’d get an
answer, would you dare to ask the question?
Even though it is scary, I probably would. For
as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted
to know everything about everything. (Impos-
sible!) I have spent much of my life pursuing
this “will-o-the-wisp” and er\joyed every
moment of it. Thanks, Mr. Sheffield, for rais-
ing the question.

The others were good, too — but these
grabbed me! Thank you, SFA, for bringing
them to me.

Peter Blackwell

Dear Editor

I’m tempted to write a book to agree with,
but also disagree with, reader Sandra H.
Necchi. I’ll make one complex comment:
the weakness of the welfare system has
always been unwillingness to face the most

obvious — it costs to pay people as they
begin to work or begin an education to bet-
ter themselves, but it will be a worthwhile
act that will pay off. Problem: I think many
politicians and the rich and the powerful are
afraid of too much upward mobility. They’d
rather have illegal aliens to add to the bulk of
the poor. And for God’s sakes don’t do any-
thing to help a lot of poor people increase the
size of the hated middle class.

Science fiction and the space program are
needed to inspire us to the highest. We
shouldn’t stop the space program until all
problems on Earth are solved, i.e., stop crying
“give me the money.” Scientific advances
always help people.

The initial reason I wanted to write this let-
ter was because of the excellent “Moon Six”
by Stephen Baxter. I hope it wins a prize. It’s
a haunting tale exceedingly well done.

Roscoe Wright

Deal- Mr. Edelman:

I just finished reading your Editorial in the
March 1997 issue of Science Fiction Age. It is
so refreshing to find that there are others like
me out there. I, too, love to read, watch, see
and hear SF, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, et al. In
fact, you might say I go one step further in
reading academic SF as well — stuff on the
history, sociology and literaiy criticism/analy-
sis of science fiction and its many faces.

As geeky as it may sound, SF permeates
every aspect of my life, whether I like it or
not. It is the dominant pigment of the
glasses through which I see life. And I like
that. Currently, I live in an SF black hole.
Among my current group of friends, I am the
only person who likes SF. I subscribe to
both Science Fiction Age and Sci-Fi Enter-
tainment, and love them both. They help
me connect to the fan base “out there,” and
together give me a more well-rounded view
than either would alone.

Thanks for “coming out of the closet.”
Maybe it will encourage others who have not
been so brave to come into the “light.” I
agree — science fiction, sci-fi and SF
shouldn’t fight. To quote an overquoted
phrase, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Of course, this is coming from a person
who doesn’t understand the evolution vs. cre-
ation or the nature vs. nurture debates. As I
see it, what’s there to debate? They both
work, are not mutually exclusive, and only
enhance each other. The same goes for the
“universes” of SF. Although I understand hav-
ing a preference for one or more over
another, this does not mean one is necessar-
ily “better.”

Carma Spence

Deal' Editor

Although I have been reading science fic-
tion since Isaac Asimov was a young man, I
have just seen my first copy (November
1996). I have not yet read much of it, but my
initial impression is more than favorable.
Right off, however, two things caught my
immediate attention:

First, a letter from Tracy L. Zellich com-
menting on the paucily of contributions from
female authors. The letter is symptomatic of
an alarming trend in today’s society towards
a false democracy in which it is considered
more important to have all races, sexes, etc.,
proportionally represented everywhere than
to find the best work possible, regardless of
who does it. The race, sex, age, planet of ori-
gin, sexual orientation, and species of your
writers are utterly irrelevant. The only tiling
that matters is to get the finest writers you
can find.

Secondly, I’m sure I won’t be the only one
to comment on a typo in the first paragraph
on Page 10 that drastically changes the mean-
ing of the sentence in which it occurs from
what was presumably intended. “Territorial
avarice a la Hitler’s quest for liebensmum...”.
Surely the word should b eLebensraum (cap-
italized as are all German nouns), which
means “living space.” Liebensraum means
“loving space,” which was most emphatically
not what Hitler wanted!

Donald M. Graham

Deal' Mr. Edelman:

I have been reading science fiction for
thirty-seven years, and “A Chicago Dinner
Party, Sometime After" [by W. Gregory Stew-
art, November 1996] was the most ridiculous
tiling I have ever read. I know everybody is a
critic and some would say, and have said, that
I am off my rocker, but 1 think Heinlein would
turn over in his grave if he read this story. (If
you can call it a story.) I know people have
different tastes, and that is usually a good
thing. However, this story is just too weird.

Donald 0. Townsend

As Abraham Lincoln said, it is impossi-
ble to please all of the people all of the time.
I’ve discovered that this maxim is as true
for editors as it is for presidents. Take a
look at this issue’s Editorial for the results
of our annual Reader’s Poll to discover what
I mean.

Readers— please let us know how we’re
doing at: Letters to the Editor, Science Fiction
Age, 441 Carlisle Dr., Herndon, VA 20170,
or e-mail to S.Edelmanl@Genie.Geis.Com.
or use CompuServe address: 102746,2004.

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Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of TUB Coast. Film Edition, the tap symbol ( <• ). and ntana symbols ( * * r a *) are trademarks or Wizards of the Coast. Inc.
Illustrations by Adrian Smith. Roger Raupp. and Dan Frazier. ©1996 Wizards of the Coast. Inc. All rights reserved.

books

By Paul di Filippo, D. Douglas Fratz and Rachel Russell

Asimov’s greatest creation lives on

in the pages of Benford’s Foundation’s Fear.

F or those of us with less than an Ency-
CLOpedia Galactica’s worth of memory, per-
haps a quick recapitulation of the status of
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series at the time
of his death might be in order. Following that, we can
truly appreciate the latest installment in the series, Foun-
dation’s Fear (HarperPrism, hardcover, $23.00, 400
pages), penned by the first of three estate-selected heirs
to Asimov’s universe, Gregory Benford. Beginning in
1982, Asimov set out to unify the
majority of his fiction into one coher-
ent future history.

Anyone familial - with Asimov’s classic
robot novels — The Caves of Steel, (1954)
and The Naked Sun (1957) — probably
recalls the state of galactic affairs at that
future point. Earth is a human hive, fifty
Spacer Worlds dominate interstellar
affairs, and robots are generally per-
fected, culminating in the unique human-
iform creation, R. Daneel Olivaw. It’s a far
haul from here to the 25 million human-
occupied worlds of the Empire, robotless
and forgetful of their Earth origins. But

somehow Asimov managed to chart the course.

In The Robots of Dawn (1983), Lije Baley travels once
more to the world of Aurora, reuniting with liis old part-
ner, Olivaw, to solve a single murder, and simultaneously
to break the current stagnation that thwarts human expan-
sion into the galaxy. By novel’s end, tire road is open for
Earth-based humanity to surpass tire superannuated Spac-
ers and explode into the galaxy. With their short lives and
anti-robot sentiments, these Earthers are plainly the
ancestors of the Empire, the long-lived, robot-loving Spac-
ers now a dead branch on tire evolutionary tree.

Robots and Empire (1985) opens 200 years later, with
that expansion a reality. The fabled radiation poisoning of
Earth is explained as a last-gasp Spacer attack. Olivaw
picks up the power of mentally manipulating humans
from a freak robot named Giskard, and the Zeroth Law of
Robotics is formulated, placing the good of humanity as
a whole above that of any individual human.

Next in the sequence conre novels from Asimov’s early
fulltime writing careen The Currents of Space (1952); The
Stars, Like Dust (1951); and Pebble in the Sky (1950).
Two new bridging works are now necessary to get to the
core series of Foundation (1951), Foundation arid
Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953).

In Prelude to Foundation (1988), the Empire is on the
cusp of its long slow disintegration, yet seemingly rich
and immortal. Hari Seldon is a young man come to Tran-
tor to deliver a paper at a convention. Identified by the
disguised Olivaw— now a 20,000-year-old positronic
Machiavelli— as the unique human who can perfect the
invaluable psychohistory (or the “laws of humanics”
which Olivaw dimly foresaw millennia ago), Seldon is
thrust into danger and into situations that will set him on
his destined course. He acquires a s loving protector a
wife who is also a humaniform robot , and an adopted son.

Forward the Foundation (1993) details the rest of Sel-
don’s long life. Laboring as First Minister to Emperor
Cleon and then after a fall from grace as a simple profes-
sor, Seldon and his comrades work through frustration
and despair to perfect psychohistorv. When Seldon’s own
granddaughter proves to have surprising mental powers,
he conceives of the parallel, hidden Second Foundation.

By the time of his death, the Empire is
plainly failing, and his dual Foundations
are established.

The farthest two extensions of the
future history are Foundation’s Edge
(1982) and Foundation and Earth
(1983). Functioning almost as a single
book, they recount the exploits of one
Golan Trevize, an impetuous young
Foundation Councillor who suspects
the continued existence of the ostensi-
bly destroyed Second Foundation.
What he discovers on a race across the
stars from assembled pursuers is
something stranger: the existence of a

ABOVE: Charles
Sheffield tried to
recapture the thrill
of space with The
Billion Dollar Boy,
as did artist
Vincent Di Fate
with his cosmic
cover

Batteries never included.

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that pul a charge into your game.

Magic: The Gathering: a game of strategy and imagination.

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Magic. The Gathering. Wizards OF TUB COAST, Fifth Edition. Ihc tap symbol ( e|, ami manu symbols (# « 9 a *) are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
Illustrations by Adrian Smith. Roger Raupp, and Dan Frazier. 01996 Wizards of Ihc Coast. Ine. All rights reserved.

world-mind called Gaia, which has its own
plans for the galaxy.

Gregory Benford — noted for his own enor-
mous cycle of Galactic history — has chosen
to shoehorn his book into the seemingly
miniscule space between Prelude and For-
ward : a short interval before Seldon became
First Minister. The need for this is plain, if not
at first obvious: as Benford tells us in his after-
word, “elements make their first appearance
here [which will be amplified in] Greg Bear’s
Foundation and Chaos [and David] Brin’s
Third Foundation .” In other words, some
heavy duty retrofitting is needed in order to
nurture the series beyond Asimov’s limits.

On the issue of fidelity, Foundation’s Fear
rates high. Benford has moderated his dense,
occasionally Faulknerian prose into a
slimmed-down style veiy reminiscent of Asi-
mov’s own. Glints of Benford’s cosmic per-
spective and wryness still shine through, but
in matters of dialogue and description, Ben-

ford aligns neatly with Asimov. As for matters
of factual precedent, Benford has the canon-
ical history down pat. No brazen contradic-
tions are engendered. Perhaps the biggest
modification is in the arena of FTL travel.
Benford has chosen to depict a more plausi-
ble and limited wormhole network linking the
worlds of the Empire rather than the magical
hyperdrive.

Readeis will be most interested in the new
material conjured up by Benford. First off is
greater cybernetic realism. Trantor now pos-
sesses the “Mesh,” its own super-Internet.
Into the Mesh are seeded two simulated per-
sonalities derived from Old Earth artifacts: a
virtual Voltaire and a jerry-rigged Joan of Arc.
These two artificial personalit ies carry much
of the plot, exploring with Egan-level subt lety
issues of being and nonbeing. And what t hey
discover hidden in the Mesh selves to explain
the famous all-human nature of tire galaxy.

Additionally, thanks to the recent invention
of chaos theory, Benford is able to make more
plausible the whole concept of psychohistory
and how it might be developed. We get a real
sense of the intellectual chase — both physi-
cal and mental — that Seldon is engaged in.
And with Benford’s own daily experience in
the realm of academe, there is a further
heightening of Seldon’s university experi-
ence, including plenty of satirical jabs.

Benford’s actual plot strikes me as neatly
episodic in the manner of the original Foun-
dation books. Fear reads almost like three or
four linked novellas, even with its well-
planned, suitably climactic story arc. We do
get to see a few more new worlds out of those
multi-million, and life-or-death crises intrude
thereon. But basically, Benford’s book,
despite a disclaimer, shares with Asimov's an
emphasis on “thoughts and conversation,
[not] physical suspense.”

And just as in the Good Doctor’s work, we
relish every cerebral twist and turn.

Paul Di Filippo

The Billion Dollar Boy, by Charles
Sheffield, Tor Books, hardcover, 256 pages,
$22.95

The juvenile science fiction novels of
Robert Heinlein, published in the late 1940s
and 1950s, introduced a whole generation of
bright youngsters to SF literature, and helped

create a group of dedicated readeis who still
form much of the core audience for modem
SF. The folks at Tor Books appear to have
decided that a new series of young adult nov-
els in the same tradition is now needed to
bring a new generation to the genre, and have
created their Jupiter line of novels.

Charles Sheffield’s The Billion Dollar Boy is
the second novel in the Jupiter series, the first
of which was last year’s Higher Education ,
which Sheffield co-
authored with Jerry Pour-
nelle. Both novels, like the
Heinlein books on which
they are modeled, are
space adventure science
fiction with clear mes-
sages glorifying the com-
petent individual.

Sheffield’s new novel
begins on a 22nd-Cen-
tury Earth that is over-
populated and mostly
poor, with only a small
number of super-rich
families controlling
most of the wealth mid
power. The billion dol-
lar boy of the title is a
spoiled and totally
obnoxious fifteen-

year-old rich kid named Shelby Crawford
Jerome Prescott Cheever V who lives
with his brainless socialite mother and
appears to spend most of his time making t he
servants miserable. He seldom sees his cor-
porate-mogul father, and appeal’s to have no
friends, intellectual pursuits, or redeeming
social qualities. On a whim, after watching a
few seconds of a puerile space comedy on TV,
he badgeis his mother into taking him on a
luxury space cniise.

Bored, Shelby wants to visit the space min-
ing operations in the outer system using the
system of nodes that allow instantaneous
matter transfer. When the spaceliner's cap-
tain is too busy to go immediately, he gets
drunk, dons a space suit, and goes into the
node by himself, spuming the attempts of the
node’s robot assistants to provide him with
tlie hand-held control he obviously needs to
pick his destination.

Thus Shelby ends up twenty-two light years
from Earth in a remote region of space where
a small society of space mind's are collecting
rare stable transuranic elements in a strange
dust cloud of unexplainable origins. He is
miraculously rescued by a highly-intelligent
mining robot, and taken in by a family that
spends most of each year mining the cloud
before returning to the asteroid belt. They do
not believe his stoiy of being the son of one of
the Earth’s richest men, and cannot afford to
return early on the chance that he is telling the
truth. Shelby must therefore stay with them
for several months before he can return home.

Our bored rich brat adapts quickly, how-
ever, and becomes a valuable and productive
member of the mining team. He is befriended
by the family’s hard-working 15-year-old
daughter, Grace, along with her 12-year-old
brother, taught the meaning of hard work
and discipline by their mother, the ship’s cap-
tain, and respectfully tolerated by their uncle
and two other men working for the family.
Most of the book chronicles Shelby’s emo-
tional and intellectual coming-of-age with
Grace and the others.

These sections of The Billion Dollar Boy
marvelously recreate
the strengths of Hein-
lein’s best juvenile nov-
els. The mining family
that adopts him is a typ-
ical Heinlein family, as
is the larger society of
miiiers with which they
work, with individual
competence and a hard-
work ethic predominant
themes. Shelby’s and
Grace’s adventures are
compelling, and the dust
cloud they are examining
a fascinatingly strange and
beautiful hard-SF creation,
replete with dangerous
“reels” and what in the end
appears to be a strange
alien life form.

•n Sale Now at Bookstori

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Shelby’s maturation and adventures in the
dust cloud are excellent, sense-of-wonder-
filled juvenile SF in the Heinlein tradition. But
is this novel good enough to entice today’s
kids away from sci-fi movies and return them
to written SF?

Unfortunately, probably not.

One of the essential things needed for juve-
nile fiction to be highly popular is a sympa-
thetic juvenile protagonist with whom the
reader can identify. In addition, any didacti-
cism in juvenile novels must be subtle. And
finally — and this may be the salutary dis-
tinction between juvenile and adult fiction
(other than lack of sex) — the juvenile char-
acters should in numerous and subtle ways
be more intelligent and perceptive than the
adult characters.

While Sheffield incorporates these qualities
well into the middle sections of the novel,
they are not achieved in the opening chapters,
or to a lesser extent in the denouement.
Shelby does not begin the novel as a sympa-
thetic character. He, as well as his mother, are
too obviously strawmen created simply to
illustrate their flaws. This makes Shelby’s
rapid transformation into a sympathetic char-
acter after he meets Grace’s family uncon-
vincing. Shelby’s father, when he shows up at
the end, also demonstrates caring and wis-
dom that is inconsistent with his lack of atten-
tion to his son prior to his space adventure.

For The Billion Dollar Boy to serve its
intended purpose, and reach the young read-
ership it deserves, the first two and final chap-
ters would need to be rewritten to make
young Shelby less reprehensible and more of
a tragically ignored rich kid. As it is, I fear that
too many young readers will stop after two
chapters and miss the fine coming-of-age sci-
ence fiction adventure stoiy that follows.

D. Douglas Fratz

In Death Ground by David Weber and
Steve White. Baen Books, paperback, 629
pages, $6.99.

The exciting discoveries of actual planets
around other suns that the Hubbell has
allowed, combined with the fossil of what
may have been a primitive Martian life form
found in an asteroid, may push us back out to
space and to those dreams of faster-than-light
travel, colonizing new worlds and meeting
actual sentient aliens. But what if we meet
powerful aliens? What if they are bug-eyed
monsters? What if they consider us lunch?

Mind you, I’m still excited about space
exploration and don’t want us to chicken out.
But David Weber and Steve White have writ-
ten quite a scary, classic science fiction novel
that could almost be a warning to stay home
and not wander about in space. Weber and
White are an experienced team of writers.
Their past credits include Insurrection
(1990) and Crusade (1992).

In Death Ground starts with a routine sur-
vey mission making a first transition through
a previously unexplored warp point. They
Continued on page 96

Poetry Contest
$48,000.00 in Prizes

The National Library of
Poetry to award 250
total prizes to amateur
poets in coming months

Owings Mills, Maryland - The National
Library of Poetry has just announced that
$48,000.00 in prizes will be awarded over
the next 12 months in the North American
Open Amateur Poetry Contest. The contest
is open to everyone and entry is free.

“We’re especially looking for poems
from new or unpublished poets," indicated
Howard Ely, spokesperson for The National
Library of Poetry. “We have a ten year his-
tory of awarding large prizes to talented
poets who have never before won any type
of writing competition.”

How To Enter

Anyone may enter the competition sim-
ply by sending in ONLY ONE original
poem, any subject, any style, to:

The National Library of Poetry
Suite 1759
1 Poetry Plaza

Owings Mills, MD 21117-6282
The poem should be no more than 20
lines, and the poet’s name and address must
appear on the top of the page. “All poets
who enter will receive a response concern-
ing their artistry, usually within seven
weeks,” indicated Mr. Ely.

Possible Publication
Many submitted poems will also be con-
sidered for inclusion in one of The National

* 3 *

The National Library of Poetry publishes the work of amateur
poets in colorful liurdbounil anthologies like The Coming of
Dawn, pictured above. Each volume features poetry by a diverse
mix of poets from all over the world.

Library of Poetry's forthcoming hardbound
anthologies. Previous anthologies published
by the organization have included On the
Threshold of a Dream, Days of Future's
Past, Of Diamonds and Rust , and Moments
More to Go, among others.

“Our anthologies routinely sell out
because they are truly enjoyable reading,
and they are also a sought-after sourcebook
for poetic talent," added Mr. Ely.

World’s Largest Poetry Organization

Having awarded over $150,000.00 in
prizes to poets worldwide in recent years,
The National Library of Poetry, founded in
1982 to promote the artistic accomplish-
ments of contemporary poets, is the largest
organization of its kind in the world.
Anthologies published by the organization
have featured poems by more than 100,000
poets.

“We’re always looking for new poetic
talent,” said Mr. Ely. “I hope you urge your
readers to enter the contest. There is
absolutely no obligation whatsoever, and
they could be our next big winner.”

® 1987-1997 The National Library ol Poetry

IHESCIENCEFCTONAND

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AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER

THE FLEET OF
STARS
Poul Anderson

The fourth and final
volume of Anderson’s
superlative and visionary
Harvest of Stars epic

“Puts us into a whole new
world. Poul has traced a
thousand trends, pulled them tightly together, and
created a masterpiece.”

— Larry Niven on Harvest of Stars

“One of science fiction’s most consistently impressive
writers. . . .The bleak surfaces of distant asteroids and
the nearer moon become beautiful and vibrant in
Anderson’s hands.”

— Omni on The Stars Are Also Fire

THE BILLION
DOLLAR BOY

A Jupiter™ Novel

Charles Sheffield

“A gripping, genuine story.

. . . Far and away, the most
believable and interesting
near-space milieu I’ve
seen in years.”

— Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game,
on Higher Education

“A rousing boy-grows-up-in-space adventure that
echoes Heinlein’s best coming-of-age novels. . . .
Fans of hard sf will revel in this absorbing
adventure’s abundant
technical detail.”
— Booklist, on Higher Education

0-312-86036-6 • $24.95

0-312-86204-0 • $22.95

FRAMESHIFT
Robert J. Sawyer

From the 1996 Nebula
Award-winning author of
The Terminal Experiment

“A fast-paced thriller
backed up by fascinating
research and a penetrating
intelligence. With
Frameshift, Sawyer vaults
assuredly into Koontz territory.”

— Terence M. Green, author of Blue Limbo

“Sawyer’s impressive storytelling skills make The
Terminal Experiment a compelling thriller.”

— Toronto Star

0-3 12-863 25 -X • $23.95

FINAL
DIAGNOSIS
James White

A new Sector
General novel

“[White’s] novels and
stories — particularly those
involving Sector General,
a galactic hospital serving

many species of intelligent life — are veritable
Disneylands of delight, wonder, and odd characters.”
— The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
on The Galactic Gourmet

“Consistently entertaining, combining the
best features of first-contact SF with the
‘human’ interest of hospital stories.”
— Locus on the Sector General series

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HIGHER EDUCATION

A Jupiter™ Novel
Charles Sheffield and
Jerry Pournelle

“Reads like the best of the Del Rey
and Heinlein juveniles — very
entertaining for teens and yet
weighty enough for adults . . . some
of the best hard sf [this reviewer
has] seen in a while.”

— Absolute Magnitude

0-812-53890-0 • $5.99/$7.99 Can

THE FORTUNATE FALL
Raphael Carter

“By turns terrifying and tender,
frustrating and fulfilling — a superb
example of speculative fiction.”
— The New York Times

“A rich, exhilarating hook . . .
plunges readers into a complex
futuristic milieu.”
— Starlog
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The Fortunate Fall

MINDSTAR RISING
Peter F. Hamilton

An explosive new series of
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Sage Walker

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THE GALACTIC
GOURMET
James White

Now in paperback — another novel
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FIRESTAR
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Now available in paperback,
the first volume of Flynn’s epic hard
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“As Robert A. Heinlein did and all
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he’d been there and was bringing
back reports of what he’d seen.”
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Movies

By Dan Perez

Summer’s sci-fi blockbusters

stand ready to invade your local theaters.

For ha rdcore SF
fans, the lipcom ing
Paid Verhoeven-
directed adaptation
of Robert A.

Heinle in 's classic
novel of al ien wa r-
fare Starship
Troopers (above
and below) is the
most eagerly
awaited adaptation
of the yea r.

S PRING HAS ARRIVED, AND FOR MOVIEGOERS THAT
means that the summer blockbuster movie sea-
son is just around the comer. Every summer the
blockbuster stakes get higher and more stuff
blows up real good. Unfortunately, the quality of big sum-
mer movies seems to be steadily declining, even as they
rack up record box office receipts. Last summer’s
blowout Independence Day was
fun, but it was nevertheless a
Frankenstein’s monster of a
movie, cobbled together from
elements from a half-dozen other
films. It’s noteworthy that the
Special Edition of the Sta rs Wars
Trilogy came out a few months
back: It’s the movie that spawned
the blockbuster phenomenon,
for better or worse.

Since spring is often a time of
lean pickings as the studios

square off for summer, it’s worthwhile to devote this
issue’s column to assorted news and previews of upcom-
ing summer movies.

Genre television shows racked up Golden Globes from
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association last January.
Fox’s TheX-Files won Best TV Drama and its stars David
Duchovny and Gillian Anderson both walked away with
Best Acting in a TV Drama
awards. NBC’s Tim'd Rock From
The Sun snared the Best TV
Musical or Comedy award, and
its star John Lithgow was hon-
ored as Best Comedy Actor ( Mad
About Tow’s Helen Hunt inter-
rupted a Third Rock clean sweep
by taking Best Comedic Actress).
The Golden Globes are usually
heralded as a strong indicator of
Oscar winners, but alas, no genre
movies won.

ABOVE: Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones play the Men In Black, intergalactic immi-
gration agents. BELOW: An FX wizard preparing an alien invader for Men In Black.

I’m saddened by the death (December 30,
at the age of 53) of Jack Nance, who played
the title role in David Lynch’s fabulously sur-
real Eraserhead. Nance was unforgettable as
the nerdy, big-haired Henry Spencer, who
sired a mutant baby and fantasized about a
chipmunk-cheeked woman living in his radi-
ator. After acting in all but one of David
Lynch’s films and appearing as a sheriff in
Twin Peaks, even Nance’s death had a
Lynchian quality to it: He died from injuries
sustained in an altercation at a donut shop in
Pasadena, California Police are investigating
the case as a possible homicide.

Shortly after this issue goes to press, pro-
duction is scheduled to commence on New
Line Productions’ movie version of Lost in
Space. Based on Irwin Allen’s campy TV
series, the $70 million production had actors
(including Tim Robbins, Gary Oldman and
Kenneth Branagh) clamoring for the coveted
role of Dr. Zachaiy Smith, formerly played by
Jonathan Harris. Oldman got the role, which
is okay, because if you’re like me, you want
Branagh to keep his schedule open so that
maybe George Lucas will cast him as
the young Obi Wan Kenobi in the
upcoming Star Wars prequels.
Costarring with Oldman in this
updated, more serious version of
Lost in Space will be William Hurt as
Dr. John Robinson, Mimi Rogers as
Maureen Robinson, Heather Graham
(Swingers) as Judy, and Lacey
Chabert (Party of Five) as Penny.

Taking over Billy Mumy’s role as Will
Robinson will be Jack Johnson (Love
Affair). Batman and Robin writer
Akiva Goldsman wrote the script,

and Stephen Hopkins will direct. The buzz is
that there may not even be a robot to shout
“Danger, Will Robinson!”

And how about those Star Wars prequels,
anyway? Rumors are flying thick and fast
about them (and have been well before Lucas
officially announced preproduction), but here
are some reasonably safe bets:

Lucas will produce and direct the first
movie, which will take place twenty to forty
years before the events in Star Wars: A New
Hope. Earlier versions of C3PO and R2D2 will
appear. State-of-the-art CGI effects will be
used extensively. The story is a closely
guarded secret, but will feature a middle-aged
Obi Wan Kenobi and his youthful student,
Anakin Skywalker, who will be seduced by the
dark side of the Force and eventually become
Darth Vader as the Republic crumbles. A
younger Yoda will also be featured. All three
movies will be filmed simultaneously, and tire
release date for the first film is May of 1999.

As for upcoming summer movies, Memor-
ial Day will bring us Universal’s hotly antici-
pated The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic

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ABOVE: Jurassic Park’s nasty reptiles are back in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World.
BELOW: Actress Uma Thurman moves from Pulp Fiction to science fiction in Gattaca.

Park. Steven Spielberg is at the helm again,
and we can expect more CGI/animatronic
dinosaurs from Oscar-winning effects experts
Dennis Muren and Stan Winston. Jeff Gold-
blum returns to the role of quirky mathe-
matician Ian Malcom and Richard Attenbor-
ough reprises his role as park creator John
Hammond. Julianne Moore ( Assassins )
costars. The scoop is that seven types of
dinosaurs (including the diminutive “compy”
— short for compsognathus ) will appear, and
there will be scenes of scientists cutting a
dinosaur out of a herd with jeeps and a motor-
bike and, most intrigningly, multiple T-rexes.

In June, watch for The Fifth Element from
French director Luc Besson ( The Profes-
sional), whose last science fiction movie was
1984’s Le Dernier Combat. This big-budget film,
which stars Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian
Holm and Luke Perry, has been shrouded in
intense secrecy, but a few tidbits have surfaced.
Production design will be done by Jean-Claude
Mzires, who wrote a 20-volume graphic novel
in the late ’60s that featured a “spatio-temporal
agent” named Valerian. The story is said to take
place in a futuristic New York City and the spe-
cial effects budget alone is said to be a jaw-
dropping $100 million (James Cameron’s Digi-
tal Domain is handling the effects).

The director who brought you
the bat-butt and bat-nipples, Joel
Schumacher, serves up Warner
Bros.’ Batman and Robin in June.

The star-laden cast features
George Clooney in his first turn in
the bat-suit, along with Uma Thur-
man as Poison Ivy and Arnold
Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze.

Costars include John Glover;

Vivica Fox; and Elle MacPherson,
who plays another bat-crossed
lover. During the making of One
Fine Day, former Catwoman
Michelle Pfeiffer reportedly
advised costar George Clooney to

make sure the producers included a trapdoor
in his bat-suit so he could go to the bathroom.

Columbia brings out Men in Black in June,
as well. The trailer for this tongue-in-cheek
story of two secret government agents who
investigate and deal with extraterrestrials
who come to Earth is already in theaters, and
it looks great. Tommy Lee Jones and Will
Smith (fresh from all that alien whup-ass in
Independence Day) play the eponymous
characters, Kay and Jay, who have big guns
and bigger attitudes. Linda Fiorentino costars
and Barry Sonnenfeld directs. ILM is handling
CGI flying saucer and alien effects.

Also in June, Walt Disney Studios releases
Hercules, its latest animated feature. The
mythic movie will be directed by Ron
Clements and John Musker and will feature
the voice talents of Tate Donovan (as Her-
cules), James Woods, Danny DeVito, Susan
Egan and Rip Tom. The story, a musical adap-
tation of the 12 tasks of Hercules, will feature
one production number called “Zero to Hero.”
Legendary Disney villain creator Andreas
Deja will be designing Hercules.

In July, Jodie Foster stars in Contact, based
on the novel of extraterrestrial first contact
by the late Carl Sagan. Flavor-of-the-month

Matthew McConaughy costars in this Warner
Bros.’ production, along with John Hurt,
David Morse and Rob Lowe. Robert Zemeckis
(j Back to the Future, Forrest Gump ) directs.

In August, Todd McFarlane’s popular comic
series Spawn is adapted for the screen by
New Line. John Leguizamo (The Pest ) plays
tire hellish Clown under a ton of makeup, and
Michael Jai White plays the Clown’s rebel-
lious protege, known as Spawn. Director
Mark Dipp (who used to work with Industrial
Light and Magic) does double-duty, creating
computer effects for the powerful Spawn suit
and a three-minute CGI vision of Hell itself.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is New Line’s
sequel to the videogame-martial arts movie
Mortal Kombat, and features tire heroes who
saved tire Earth last time battling the minions
of an evil emperor named Shao Khan. Robin
Shou, Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Sot and James
Renrar star. John Leonetti directs.

Gattaca stars Unra Thurman and Ethan
Hawke in this futuristic thriller about genetic
purity and predetermination and a suppos-
edly inferior hero who bucks the system. The
Columbia production was written and
directed by Andrew Niccol.

Universal’s Kull the Conqueror is a fantasy
tale based on a character created by Robert
E. Howard, who created Conan. Kevin Sorbo
of TV’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
stars as the hunky barbarian. Costars include
Tia Carrere, Litefoot and Harvey Fierstein.
John Nicolla directs from Charles ( Dragon-
heart ) Pogue’s screenplay. Rafaella De Lau-
rentiss produced. The film was shot in Slova-
kia, utilizing many of the same locations as
Dragonheart. Sorbo plays a barbarian who
ascends to the throne after slaying an insane
king. Complications ensue when scheming
nobles resuscitate an ancient witch (Carerre)
to dethrone Kull.

Finally in August, there’s Paramount’s Event
Horizon, in which the world’s first faster-than-
light spaceship vanishes on its maiden voyage,
only to reappear several years later, harbor-
ing a mysterious transdimensional life form.
Paul Anderson directs. Stars include Laurence
Fishbume (who plays the leader of tire sal-
vage team exploring the lost ship), Kathleen
Quinlan and Richard T. Jones.

In September, New Line’s Dark City will
feature William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland and
and Jennifer Connelly in a futuristic tale of
amnesia, murder and mistaken identity. Alex
Proyas directs.

Starship Troopers was originally sched-
uled for July, but has been moved back to
late summer/early fall. It’s based (loosely, it’s
reported) on the classic novel by Robert A.
Heinlein. Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total
Recall ) directs from a script by Robocop
writer Ed Neumier. There’s no powered
armor, alas, but thanks to effects whiz Phil
Tippet (Jurassic Park), there’ll be nasty CGI
bug aliens aplenty. Neil Patrick Harris, Van
Dien, Dina Meyer, Michael Ironside and
Clancy Brown star in this TriStar produc-
tion. □

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Collectibles

We covered our eyes when they first
appeared on the screen, and then we peeked
through our tight and trembling fingers. They
lurched, staggered, and stalked us, and we
adored them even as they scared us silly. They
were the sci-fi and horror monsters of Uni-
versal Studios, always
frightening, yet always
strangely sympathetic. Kitchen Sink Press has
brought them all back in their Universal Mon-
sters of the Silver Screen trading card series.
All of our spooky old friends are included,
such as Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and
The Creature from the Black Lagoon, as well
as lesser known creatures like The Leech
Woman and The Mole People. This 90 card
series features rare stills plucked from over
70 films produced by Universal between 1923
and 1960. Authors James Vance ( Kings in
Disguise ) and Kate Worley ( Omaha the Cat
Dancer ) provide a detailed background text
for each movie still. Each pack contains eight
foil-stamped photo cards plus a full-color
sticker reproducing one of ten assorted movie
lobby cards. These are available in finer comic
and hobby shops everywhere.

11 Step Beyond

verybody some-
times needs a little
help to get through
the night, even
those of us who’ve boldly
gone where no one has gone
before. That’s why IF Books,
r j a division

ofInter -

faith Resources, has pub-
lished 77 te Unauthorized
St m fleet Daily Meditation
Manual ($14.95). This com-
pact manual for spiritual liv-
ing bases its daily doses of
insight on quotes from the
characters who populate all
four generations of Star Trek.
Captain Picard’s warning to

“Live now! Make ‘now’ the
most precious time!" is
accompanied by a few para-
graph on applying these
precepts to one’s daily life,
and every day of the year
has its own unique brand of
wisdom, thanks to com-
piler and author Mark
Stanley Haskett. To keep
the Hollywood lawyers
happy, the author is forced
to remind us that this volume
"was not prepared, approved,
licensed or endorsed by any
entity or person involved in
creating or producing the
Star Trek television series or
films,” but. somewhere, we

3'fiRrLEET

D A I ■ i_ Y
MEDITATION
M A - N- U A T +

JOINO BOLDLY

ON THE SP(RiT(( flL PATH

^ MARK STANLEY HASKETT ’

know, Gene Roddenberry
is smiling. Tliis book per-
fectly embraces the philoso-
phy behind Trek, and regard-
less of what the lawyers must
say, he would have been
pleased to own a copy.

DoNotPass Dagobah...

Collectibles

The Star Wars trilogy, with an apparent monopoly on film-
goers’ dollars for the first quarter of 1997, now has yet another
Monopoly in its sights. We’re referring here to the classic
Parker Brothers’ real estate trading game that has left genera-
tions of dice-roller's fearful of landing on Boardwalk. Now,
with the Star Wars Limited Collectors Edition, the dynamics
have changed for this most beloved of all
board games. Instead of fighting before the
game begins over who gets to choose the race car marker
and who gets stuck as the thimble, you can instead do bat-
tle to decide who plays as C3PO and who get to be Darth
Vader (who, it seems to us, has the perfect makings of a

ruthless real estate tycoon). You needn’t fear landing on Boardwalk any longer — it’s been
replaced by the Imperial Palace — and instead of building hotels on the board, you’re landing
Millennium Falcons. Yesterday’s pastime has married tomorrow’s cosmic vision and come up with a winning
hybrid.For further information, check out the manufacturer’s website at www.pbconsumer@hasbro.com.

SF theme music has a magical place in our memories. At the start
of each show it invites us into the action that follows, and then
lingers on to echo in our minds long after the show is over. Lis-
tening to theme music can bring the entire experience vividly
back to life. The first four notes of Alexander Courage’s Star Trek
theme still have tire power to chill, even after 30 years. Now The
Cult Files, a two CD set from Silva
Screen, provides tire catalyst for dozens
of similar SF flashbacks. The first CD covers television, and
provides 20 cuts, including new hits like The X-Files and Baby-
lon 5 as well as old favorites such as The Prisoner, Doctor
Who, and V. The second CD focuses on movies, and includes
14 titles, such as Alien, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space
Odyssey. For further information, Silva Screen can be
reached at silvabop@aol.com.

Listen to me Force

As these words are being written, the re-
released Star Wars is breaking new box office
records, and by the time you read these
words, all three films will have invaded your
local theaters. The question for regular read-

ers of these pages isn't whether you went to
see them, but rather, how many times. But the
smell of stale popcorn can be endured for only
so long, and even true fans must seek other
ways to relive the excitement. One way is
through RCA Victor’s two CD set, Star Wars:
A New Hope, which presents John Williams’
complete 88 minute soundtrack for the first
time. (Earlier soundtrack releases were cut to
77 minutes.) In addition to the extra 11 min-
utes, the set also features an illustrated 32
page hardcover book, and aural delights such
as all five takes of A New Hope's main theme,
so you can listen to the behind-the-scenes

tweaking that made greatness hap-
pen. If the London Symphony Orchestra’s tra
ditional approach doesn’t bring back
enough memories, you can always g<
disco! The Best of Meco from Poly-
gram Records presents a sort of
Luke Skywalker meets The Village
People look at the triumphal
theme, in a single that hit #1 on
Billboard’s pop chart on October
1, 1977. “Since everything then
was disco,” said Meco, “why not
be able to dance to Star WarsT
Other movie music given the
disco beat include the themes
from Close Encounteis, Star Trek,
and Supennan. It’s time to get the
white polyester suit out of moth-
balls and boogie with Chewie!

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ALTERNATIVE

Seeing SOSO

F irst it was 1984 we were supposed to be worried
about, or so George Orwell warned us. Then
Arthur C. Clarke asked us to marvel at the future
of 2001. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
went retro on us when he recently co-authored
the novel 1948. Now Vertigo, the envelope-push-
ing imprint of DC Comics, is hoping that another year will enter
this pantheon of memorable dates — 2020, a year when all your
worst predictions have come true. Jamie Delano, famed for his
scripting on Hellblazer and Batman: Man-Bat, has created a ter-
rifying look at a world just twenty-three years away. 2020
Visions is a 12-issue maxiseries that tells the tale of four genera-
tions of Americans struggling to stay alive in the tumultuous Dis-
united States of America. Four different artists — Frank Quitely,
Warren Pleece, James Romberger and Steven Pugh — will each
draw three consecutive issues of this post-millennial saga.
Together, they will portray the coast-to-coast cataclysm that has
brought bizarre plagues, secessionist militias and underground
biotechnology to settings as diverse as New York, Miami, Mon-
tana and Los Angeles. Each 32 page color issue is $2.95 and is
accompanied by a photomontage cover by John Elder. This is
definitely not your parents’ comic book, and is suggested for
mature readers only. For further information, check out DC
Comics Online at keyword “DC Comics” on America Online.

Here are some of the latest hits just
invading your video store for your home
viewing pleasure:

Space Jam: Michael Jordan meets the
Warner Brothers ’toons in this mix of live
action and animation that goes one step
beyond Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Inspired by the suc-
cessful series of Nike
ads, over 11,000
visual effects shots
were used, equalling
65 minutes of the
film’s 78 minute run-
ning time. Also fea-
| turing Bill Murray,
Danny DeVito, and Seinfeld's Wayne Knight.

Star Trek: Rascals and rogues have
always been popular in film and television,
and science fiction is no exception. One of
our favorites has always been Harry Mudd
from the original Star Trek. To make sure
that a new generation is introduced to actor
Roger C. Carmel’s charming creation of
Harcourt Fenton Mudd, Paramount is
releasing The Mudd Pack, a two-cassette

boxed collection of episode 4 (“Mudd's
Women") and episode 41 (“I, Mudd”).

Leprechaun 4 in Space: If you need any
furt her proof that the spirit of Ed Wood still
lives, check out the latest installment of the
adventures of this creepy little celt. This
time, the smallest B movie horror king, as
played by Warwick Davis, is joined by Bay-
watch’s Rebekah Varlton. No longer on
Earth, the corny, campy leprechaun kills
intergalactic marines, kidnaps alien
princesses, and continues to spout his
nasty one-liners.

Sci-Fighters: Ex-professional

wrestler Roddy Piper has been carv-
ing a name for himself in sci-fi cin-
ema, most notably in John Carpen-
ter’s 1988 paranoid vision of alien
invasion, They Live. His latest
thriller, set in Boston in the year
2009, has the rowdy one as a rene-
gade cop tracking a rapist only to
discover something more terrible
than crime — the fact that the
criminal he’s hunting has been
exposed to a mutagenic virus

that’s turned him into a methane-breathing
lifeform whose task is to prepare Earth for
alien habitation. Also staring Billy Drago
(The Untouchables).

The X-Files: Six new episodes of this
cult smash hit the stores, if any show that
won five 1996 Emmy Awards — more than
any other TV show that year — can still be
considered a cult phenomenon. The six
uncut episodes — two each per tape, are
“Sleepless,” “Duane Barry,” “Asencion,”
“One Breath,” “Little Green Men,” and ‘The
Host.” Behind-the-scenes interviews with
Chris Carter, the show’s creator (and the
mind behind Millennium as well) are an
added bonus.

Hear Star Wars
the Way It Was
Meant To Be Heard!

. IKE

__ WARS TRILOGY
_ USKnON 0RIGI9IAI
PICTURE SOUNDTRACKS

ymSar

A NEW

hope

Williams

The Recordings

THE MOST COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SOUNDTRACKS OF ALL-THREE FILMS EVER RELEASED!
COMPOSED AND CONDUCTED BY THE LEGENDARY JOHN WILLIAMS, PERFORMED BY THE LONDON
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND PRODUCED BY NICK REDMAN!

OVER 60 MINUTES OF PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED AND NEWLY DISCOVERED MUSIC!

NEWLY RECORDED TRACKS!

NEVER-BEFORE-HEARD BRILLIANCE FROM DIGITAL REMASTERING OF NEWLY DISCOVERED SOURCE MATERIAL!
OLD AUDIBLE ANALOG EDlfs COMPLETELY ELIMINATED!

ALL TRACKS ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, AND PREVIOUSLY RECORDED SEGUES, WHICH DO NOT APPEAR

IN THE FILMS, HAVE BEEN REMOVED!

ARCHIVAL BONUS TRACKS OF ALTERNATE CUES PLACED CHRONOLOGICALLY AT THE END OF EACH DISC!

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Science

By Arlan Andrews and Geoffrey A. Landis

Ice on the Moon may allow us

to venture into the rest of our solar system.

ABOVE: The Moon
as it yet could be,
if we correctly
capitalize on our
most recent discov-
ery. Art by Don
Dixon. BELOW:

The familiar face of
the distant, forbid-
ding Moon.

E ach passing day, it seems, brings even more
astonishing scientific advances, and few have
more consequences than the recent discovery
of ice on the Moon. The implications for the
future of manned space exploration are enormous, so we
recently brought our Science Forum together online to
examine just what this portends.

Dr. Arlan Andrews, Sr. is a technology consultant and
high-tech entrepreneur. He is President of Andrews Cre-
ative Technologies, a founder and CEO of Survival Tech-
nologies, and a founder and former VP of MuSE Tech-
nologies, which markets the world’s most
advanced Virtual Reality software. He
served as a fellow in the U.S. Depart-
ment of Commerce and the White
House Science Office from 1991 to
1993, in both the Bush and Clin-
ton administrations. Geoffrey A.

Landis’ fiction credits include
the Hugo Award winner “A
Walk in the Sun” and the Neb-
ula Award winner “Ripples in
the Dirac Sea.” He works for the
Ohio Aerospace Institute at the
NASA Lewis Research Center.

LANDIS: I was at the Cape for the Pathfinder launch
last month. As I was driving back from the launch view-
ing area at 2:30 in the morning, after the launch was
delayed a day, I heard the news on the car radio that the
Clementine science team had officially announced
they’d found ice at the south pole of the Moon. It was
really exciting.

ANDREWS: My first thought was — “Ice on the Moon!
Gee, just as God and Wemher von Braun planned it!”

LANDIS: Clementine was a “Star Wars” satellite,
designed originally to test our missile tracking technolo-
gies for ballistic missile defense. 'Hie actual radar mea-
surements were made in 1994. This actually wasn’t the first
time that the Clementine team announced the discovery of
ice at the pole — the news has been around the space
world for a while, and it had actually been announced two
years ago, when they first got the data back. They with-
drew that announcement immediately, and said that they
had to do more analysis to confirm it. I can assure you that
these have been eagerly anticipated results!

ANDREWS: The details of the discovery were
announced in the Defense Link News web site, in a mem-
orandum for correspondents (www.dtic.mil/defenselink/
news/Dec96/Dec96.html).

LANDIS: The ice was discovered using radar. The
result is still somewhat controversial — not everybody
thinks that the analysis of the data is unquestionable.
They used an unusual kind of radar known as “bistatic”
radar. This means that the radio wave transmitter is
located at a different place than the receiver. In this case,
the transmitter was on the Clementine spacecraft in orbit
around the Moon, and the receiver on Earth.

ANDREWS: The news releases state that the analysis
of the radar data indicate a strong possibility of ice at the
South Pole of the Moon — about the size of a small lake,
namely 60-120,000 cubic meters — or, four football fields
16 feet deep. It has not been photographed to my knowl-
edge; so the evidence is not yet perfect.

LANDIS: It would be great if we could photograph the
ice, Arlan! Unfortunately, there’s a problem there — the
only reason the ice is there, is that there is no sunlight in
the permanently shadowed craters! So when you take
photos from orbit, it’s dark!

ANDREWS: I’ve been wondering about the
ice there. The south pole crater is
described as having its rim in constant
daylight, and its bottom — where
the ice might be — in perpetual
darkness. This can’t mean that a
comet plowed into the south
pole alone.

LANDIS: No, the theory is
that cornels randomly plow
into the Moon every 10,000
years or so. The ice from the
comets vaporizes, and the gas
goes all around the Moon — a

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ABOVE: When mankind returns to the moon, perhaps our explorations of the cavities
and craters will uncove)' ice that coidd provide the means to move on to other planets.

tiny, temporary atmosphere. At the extremely
low temperature at the poles, it condenses
out.

ANDREWS: Thus, the whole Moon must
have had at least momentary (geologically)
conditions in which ice was deposited and
lasted a while. 1 would guess that solar radia-
tion has driven off the rest, but there exists
the possibility now that perhaps other cracks
and crevices or buried ice fields might be
found. Can we identify other cracks and
canyons that stay in the dark?

LANDIS: Well, if you get very far away
from the poles of the Moon, the subsurface
temperature isn’t veiy cold. One way to look
for ice will be using a gamma-ray spectrome-
ter from orbit. This is going to be done with
the Lunar Prospector mission, launched this
yean The Clementine data was in the form of
the ratio of right-circularly polarized reflec-
tion to left-circularly polarized reflection. I
have heard a few scientists complain that the
Clementine team should have spent more
time thinking about alternate hypotheses that
explain the data. But then, t hat, could just be
jealousy — they didn’t find it first!

ANDREWS: As quoted in Space News, in
an article by Leonard David, Col. Pedro Rus-
tan simply said that, “The data strongly sug-
gests the presence of ice. The data looks very
encouraging."

LANDIS: Lunar Prospector will, we hope,
nail it.

SF AGE: Please explain to me and the

readers about scientific peer review. When I
mentioned the subject of this Forum to Arlan,
he said something like, “Oh, that’s old news;
the scientific community has known about it
for years.” Why is that?

ANDREWS: The space community, as
Geoff said, knew two years ago that the initial
data might indicate ice on the moon. It just
took a long time to study the data to be more
nearly sure of it. If you stay up on all the lat-
est gossip in this field as in many others, you’ll

occasionally know before the newspapeis do.
On the other hand, you wade through a lot of
junk as well.

SF AGE: So what exactly is the contro-
versy as to the interpretation of the informa-
tion? Why the disagreement?

ANDREWS: There have been suggestions
from my end of t he political spectrum that
the Lunar Prospector results about the loca-
tion of ice not be given to the world, but kept
as a national resource secret. As prospective

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Apollo XVIII astronaut Phil Chapman said
last year, the ice at the south pole could be
worth as much as $9 trillion to the nation that
utilizes it.

LANDIS: I’ve never heard this one before.

ANDREWS: The reason that this is so
exciting is that it means that the Moon has a
lot more of the elements needed to sustain
not only life but an industrial infrastructure
— we could use those well-lit peaks and that
dark ice bed to set up a plant for generating
oxygen and hydrogen cheaply. As 1 quoted
Phil Chapman, that ice is worth about $9 tril-
lion, in savings of mass to be hoisted to the
Moon. Why give it to the Japanese, who are
planning lunar colonies, or to anyone else?

LANDIS: 1 don’t think that it’s actually rea-
sonable to withhold the Lunar Prospector
data. First, it’s a NASA mission, and NASA
missions are public property. But, more to t he
point, you can't. Once you know what to look
for, eveiybody knows how to look.

ANDREWS: Lunar ice is brought to you by
the same folks who gave us the end of the
Soviet Union, among other things. Their
impetus is the military edge that space brings
to the fust and best — and t he lunar ice could
be the foundation for a lunar military system.

ANDREWS: There is no reason that NASA
couldn’t keep the data encrypted and useful
only to the llnited States.

LANDIS: Except the fact that NASA is a
civilian army And Lunar Prospector is a bar-
gain-basement cheap spacecraft. Not much
more than a gamma-ray spectroscope, a
solar panel, and a radio. Anybody could
make one, really.

ANDREWS: No — not eveiybody can
launch Lunar Prospector missions, nor follow
them up with a Marine force that can occupy
and defend one’s territory.

SF AGE: Just because we find it first,
Arlan, doesn’t mean we own it. After all, who
owns the moon? What do the treaties say?

ANDREWS: There are no treaties that
cover this, are there? Anyhow, who’s going to
argue with the fust Seal Team that claims the
ice pole for the U.S.?

LANDIS: Well, sending a military force to
claim the area is a different issue — you were
talking about keeping the location secret, and
that just can’t be done. It’s too easy to find,
now you know what to look for.

ANDREWS: Let’s not. kid ourselves. If
space flight is ever going to be self-sustaining,
it won’t be through tax dollars. Eventually it
has to turn a profit, and the people who can
get to and use that ice pond are going to do
quite well — assuming that they don’t have to
share the profits with the UN. It’s been called
“The Cold Rush” — to gain access to the most
valuable piece of real estate in the solar sys-
tem (so far).

SF AGE: What’s t he Antarctica precedent?

ANDREWS: Antarctica is different — noth-
ing there that anybody really wants, so in the
Cold War days all sides divided it up into sci-
entific stations. If something valuable were
Continued on page 97

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Bullfighting was so old fashioned.

The only worthy challenge for Frank Lazaro was a stampeding herd of triceratops.

A ll the way from the Greater Waco Suborbital Port, Frank Lazaro

still felt weightless. That, and the constant drone of the slot machines made
the neon-holo Texas landscape seem all the more unreal. Was he really there
in a limovan, heading' for the Hotel Apocalypse?

For a moment the sky was filled with a snorting triceratops, jabbing its nose-
horn into the pneumatic ass of a cute cowgirl, who winked and took a bite of
a tricerburger. Frank shuddered at the sight. Casting his eyes earthward, he saw one of the
many monuments to martyrs from some recent historical incident.

He wondered if his wife was right to doubt his sanity.

“Mid-life crisis,” alma had said, shaking her head. “I guess this is
another one of those things I’m going to have to put up with."

She had sighed. And had given him the same look she always gave
the dog after he had destroyed something. She had forgiven Frank
already. Great. He could start feeling guilty now.

He had cringed receiving that look. Sometimes he wished she
wasn’t so understanding.

And this sure had been her year to be understand-
ing. He had lost his job as a sports reporter
(“You’re hitting middle age, Frank! You’re mate-
rial is getting, well, a little tame for our audi-
ence . . . ”) just as Alma was being named the
CEO of the smart appliance software com-
pany that she helped found ten years ago.

“Why don’t you write that novel you’ve
been talking about since we were dat-
ing?” was all she had said about it.

And then his daughter, Masako, had
announced that she was going down to

the newly established People’s Republic of Amazonia to join one of
the neoJibaro tribes.

“It’s the way of the future, Daddy,” she had said, and then showed
him how she would paint her face and body to run naked in the rain
forest. This wasn’t exactly the ideal condition for his brain to start
hatching a Great American Novel.

Instead he had ended up doing a lot of net cruising. At first it was
under the pretense of research; but soon he was becoming the
sort of person he had always made fun of, an aimless
surfer of non-interactive entertainment services with
a bloodless finger on the remote upchanneling
through everything: the soap operas from all
over the globe; the infohawking of things that
would vastly improve your life for a price;
video music; the old time entertainment
media; the specialized news nets ... and,
oh yes, the spoils channels. Even good
old PRSN, the Pacific Rim Sports Net,
where a new variat ion on indoor surfing
was all the rage. This version involved
pools of piranha, and was sponsored by

Frank's

Tricer

run

BY ERNEST HOGAN
Illustration by Jack Harris

the makers of bullet- (and presumably tooth-) proof wet suits. And
as always, the score of the World Series of Mayan Basketball scrolled
across the bottom of the whole mess.

He had come up with an idea for a sidebar piece on piranha surf-
ing, reached for his palmtop, and then froze as he remembered.

That’s right He didn’t have that job anymore. Didn’t have to get
those ideas or think those kinds of thoughts anymore.

If only he could convince his brain of that.

Disgusted, he had hit the SPORTS ONLY key of his remote and
some random selection had flashed by: orbital sumo, ultrabullfight-
ing, traditional baseball from Cuba, urban climbing from a new sky-
scraper in Paris, a monster truck rally in Beijing . . .

Sports were different these days. Maybe the net execs were right.
Maybe his era was over. Perhaps it was time to step aside and make
room for the young kids . . .

Then a face had flashed on the screen. A magnificently beau-
tiful face.

His heart had skipped a beat.

The face had been replaced by an Antarctic ice boat race, then a
musclebound humanoid of undetermined sex lifting a bus full of gig-
gling school children, then ...

He had hit RECALL, and then STAY, making the face return.

It was the face of an extremely beautiful young woman. She
couldn’t have been more than few years older than Frank’s daughter.
She had sparkling, jet-black eyes, skin the color of cinnamon, and
glowing, platinum-blonde hair. She was Pilar Felix, one of the world
premier, up-and-coming young ultrabullfighters.

Suddenly she had been replaced by a shot of a large, muscular
triceratops, grazing in an indoor field of grass. White-coated techni-
cians watched and took note on cyberclipboards. The triceratops,
the white coats, and the cyberclipboards all bore the smiley-face logo
of Happy Coip.

It had cut back to Pilar before Frank could change channels. He
had always been the sort of guy who preferred grown women, with
experience smoldering behind the eyes and a little meat on their
bones — like Alma. But there was something about that soft, strong,
youthful glow that stirred something inside him. Something that he
thought had died years ago.

“I believe that the introduction of bioengineered triceratopses will
revitalize the ait of bullfighting,” she had been saying.

“What do you have to say to the traditionalists who claim that this
is essentially hiking tauromachy out of bounds?” asked the musta-
chioed interviewer.

Pilar’s exquisite nostrils had flared.

There had been an obligatory cut-in of the interviewer grinning.

“That’s what people said when they started using modem tech-
nology to make bigger, better, and smaller bulls!” She became even
more gorgeous when she was angry. “And that saved the art from
extinction! I can deal with a beast with an extra horn! The more
horns, the better! This is progress!”

Fes, Frank found himself thinking, progress!

“And what about the terrorism that has plagued bullfighting for the
last few yeais? Could that spill over into the new sport?"

Pilar had exploded with contempt, “Let them come! I’m used to
slaying monsters! I dance with death for a living! Amateurs do not
scare me!"

He had watched the rest of the interview with a religious intensity.
By the time a Stetson-wearing pitclunan had come out howling about
tlie joys of riding a motorcycle among the “tricers,” and how good
tricerburgers tasted, Frank was salivating.

Motorcycles. He hadn’t ridden one since his accident. There was a
time when he hadn’t wanted to drive anything else. How he missed
his old Harley.

He found himself on-line, registering to attend the First Annual
Texas Tricer Run.

“You know these bullfight-spinoff things are controversial, " Alma
later warned him. “And it’s in Waco, of all places! There certainly will
be protests, and probably terrorism.”

When he had grinned at the sound of that, she had added, “And I

don’t like the idea of you riding a motorcycle, Frank. You know what
happened file last time.”

That had killed his grin.

Then Masako had called, lecturing him while in a full-lotus position:
“Daddy, you’re being tempted by the dangers of so-called civilization.
You and Mom should really give it all up and join our tribe. Get back
to nature. Let the rainforest revitalize you.”

All the while, in the background, her boyfriend had wheedled
ar ound with an antique electric guitar.

Now THAT HE WAS THERE, HAVING SURVIVED THE GAUNTLET OF THE
screaming protesters who were burning an effigy of a long-dead talk
show host, and after negotiating the labyrinth of the casino lobby,
checking into file Hotel Apocalypse didn’t seem any more real. He got
his key and registration package from a haloed, winged desk clerk.
A bellhop with horns and cloven hooves grabbed his bags and led
him to the elevator that belched holoflames. On the ceiling, animated
avenging angels rained down the Wrath of God.

Why fire hell did Alma have to be so understanding, anyway? How
was he going to survive?

He was surrounded by all kinds of people who seemed to be out
of their minds, behaving in ways that made him long for the civi-
lized, climate-controlled comfort of Honolulu. The Oakland Amazon
team belched their anthem. A group of Free Scots in warpaint
whooped and yodeled. The Carnivore Pride Society sponsored a
giveaway of tricerburgers that were being fiercely devoured by glit-
tering Bosnian playgirls and boys, member's of Hell’s Angels Inter-
national, and various other men and women with bizarre idiosyn-
cratic associations.

Frank focused his eyes on the carpet. It was all flames, demons, and
sinners, interlocking in all directions. An inferno times infinity, with
beverage and body fluid stains. He trod carefully.

IN HIS ROOM WAS A SPEED SECURITY CHIP FROM ALMA. HlS HANDS SHOOK
as he snapped it into his palmtop.

There she was, more beautiful than she had been on the day she
had married him. She gave him that smile that made it impossible for
him to keep secrets from her.

“Frankie, darling,” she said. (Before he had met her, he had hated
to be called Frankie, but in her voice, it just sounded right.) “I just
wanted you to know that I love you. I realize that the last few years
have been difficult for you. I know that you need to do this — you
need to do something to get yourself back on track. I know that
you love me, and all I ask is that you don’t forget about me what-
ever you find yourself doing.”

She winked at him, and the camera autoadjusted back. She was
naked and on their bed. She proceeded to give him a performance
that made him wish he was back on that bed with her.

Afterward he had blanked the chip — possession of such things
could land you in jail in this part of Texas, even in a gambling zone
— and took a long, cold shower.

Afterward, he watched the Tricer Run orientation chip, which
featured Pilar being interviewed by someone Frank used to work
with — a delicate little Afroasian woman with file face of an angel and
the personality of a cheap android.

“Hi, y’all! I’m Traci Kuboye, and welcome to file First Annual Texas
Tricer Run right here in my hometown, Waco, Texas! The planet’s hot
new vacation spot! This here is Pilar Felix, one of the world’s fore-
most, ultrabullfighters."

Pilar smiled a human smile. “Hello, my friends.”

Frank was captivated.

“So,” said Traci, “what should our eager participants be doing now
that they’ve checked in?’

Pilar then discussed file rules and equipment. These instructions
were things Frank had gone over many time in advance. He was
tempted to fastforward, but looking at her was too enjoyable.

Then an idea hit him, hard.

He had written copy for Traci for six years, since she had come to

PRSN fresh out of college. He could use her to arrange a meeting
with Pilar. He could say that he needed to talk to her to get some
material for his novel.

It wasn't that he wanted to cheat on his wife or anything. It was just
that Pilar was the main focus of this event, and she just happened to
be beautiful, young, sexy . . .

He had a hard time sleeping that night.

T he next morning he found him-
self in his colorful plastiplex armor,
in a huge ballroom Ml of similarly
dressed people. First they all lined
up for a coat of paint; if they were
lucky and skillful enough (but
mostly just lucky), they would get
just close enough to the triceis to
get some of that paint scratched off by a sharp horn
or two. After all, what good was a brush with death if
you didn’t have the proof? Afterward eveiyone
was served a “bullfighter’s breakfast” — black coffee
with a shot of cognac (which was optional for the
alcohol-sensitive).

Before the final preparations began, Frank spotted Traci doing
some test with the soimd equipment. Knees shaking, he got up and
walked up to her. Her perpetual smile took on a cruel tone at the
sight of his sheepish grin.

“Frankie!" she embraced and kissed the air around him. “It’s so
good to see you again! Don’t tell me! You’re here as a participant! I
can’t begin to tell you how adorable you look in that armor!”

He blushed. She ate it up.

“I, uh, “ he tried to explain.

“Are you doing this for some kind of freelance thingie?” she asked,
eyelashes a-flutter.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “And I thought, uh ... I’d like to meet — I mean,
interview Ms. Felix.”

She squealed and pointed at his forehead. “There’s a vein throb-
bing right there!” Her tiny, well-manicured finger almost touched him.
“I’ve never seen that before! And, oh my! Are those perspiration beads
forming on your upper lip?”

“I’d really appreciate if you could arrange an interview for me.” He
looked sheepish and embarrassed.

“I’ve never seen you so nervous.” Her smile became predatory, and
more than a little sadistic. “Do you have a crush on her? Don’t tell me
you and Alma are having rough times since you got fired?”

“Well, actually,” he said, “no."

“You two were so cute together,” she went on without a beat. “Oh
well, nothing lasts forever! I’ll see what I can do, even though I think
Pili is a bit out of your league, but then who knows . . . you look so
adorable in this armor.”

Her nanochip-laden fingernail came a few delicate millimeters from
scratching the armor plate just above Frank’s heart. Then she turned
away, cutting him off as if he was just another channel change.
Feeling like a complete idiot, he made his way back to his seat.
He had barely sat down when the shockwave from a moderate
explosion blew him off his feet. He landed armpits first, still some-
how managing to hold onto his ecofoam coffee cup (though its con-
tents were now everywhere else).

Most of the excess energy from his fall was absorbed by a col-
lapsing table. Before he could get used to being a twisted, coffee-and-
cognac-soaked heap on the floor, several guantleted hands took hold

of him and pulled him to his feet.

“Determined to get banged up early?” said a man with an accent
that Frank couldn’t identify.

“Hey,” another man with the same accent said, “are you all right?”
Frank tried to talk, inhaled some smoke, and coughed.

A third guy immediately slapped him on the back. Frank
coughed again.

“Do you need medical assistance, sir?” a very young feminine
voice said.

Being called sir hurt worse than the fall.

“No,” he said, his voice garbled as he cleared his throat. “I’m okay.”
The young woman’s voice was familiar. Her face was even more
familial’. It was Pilar Felix. He nearly fell again.

The accented men held him up. He couldn’t help noticing that they
were also fashionably olive-skinned (they could have been melanin-
adjusted — their skin was the exact, same shade) and all three
sported identical Fu Manchu moustaches.

“Uh,” Frank said, “I’m all right.”

His armor thudded from back slaps and elbows to the ribs.

“No,” one of the Fu Manchus said.

“Hey,” said another, “he’s A-okay!”

“A real tough guy,” said the third, “can’t you tell?"

Pilar looked Frank over. Her eyes narrowed into slits. Her frown
was to die for. Frank almost did.

No, he ordered himself. He was not going be a classic geek. He
forced a tough-guy smirk, and stood up straight, noting that he was
about half a head taller than Pilar.

“I guess you look all right,” she said. “You did sign all the waivers?”
“You bet!” He pointed his finger, pistol-like, at her.

“Then have a nice tricer run,” she said.

Suddenly, the public address system kicked in:

“Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen!” It was Traci. “We have experi-
enced some technical difficulties, please bear with us while our tech-
nicians sweep the area."

Figures in bulky protective gear began to make their way through
the ballroom, waving impressive-looking, wand-like devices.

“Explosive-sniffers,” said Frank. “Could this be corporate
terrorism?”

The Fu Manchus went into a chorus of “Nah”s.

“There’s no such thing in this industry.”

“Tire company security is too good.”

“What air imagination you have.”

“Yeah,” said Frank, “I anr a writer.”

Tire Manchus went “Ah!”

“You going to tell the world what running with the tricers is
really like!”

“Yeah, none of that media glitz.”

“Good for you, sir.”

“Please,” Frank said, “I’m Frank Lazaro, I’m, er, a novelist from
Honolulu.”

“Really, how interesting.”

“Do people still read novels?”

“We’re accountants from Uruguay.”

“My name is Joe.”

“Mine’s Juan.”

“I’m Wole."

Fiank tried to make the expected manly small talk, but he really
wasn’t interested about their boring lives in the Uruguayan metro-
sprawl, and why they felt that riding with the triceratopses was going
to change their lives. Pilar was walking away. She was wearing her
usual shocking pink bullfighter’s suit, with skin-tight pants. It was a
lovely view.

But it was too late. Male bonding had taken place. He had three
buddies wiro were going to see him through his ride with the
triceratopses.

“LOOKS LIKE WE’VE GOT EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL," SAID TRACI
over the public address system. “No sign of serious explosives.
Looks like that was just a harmless little firecracker. Just a bit of

Texas-style fun! Hell, we probably won’t be bothered by anything
more serious than the protesters outside. And what’s Waco with-
out protesters?”

What indeed. After the burnings, bombings, and riots for the last
few decades, Waco had become the constant backdrop for protest-
ers. Now they were protesting the development of the resort com-
plexes, and they kept right on doing it as the tourists — who expected
them — took pictures of them.

“Time for the final paint-down; line up and be ready!”

Soon Frank, Joe, Juan, and Wole were going through the line to
the wall that opened up like some vertical blinds into the Texas sun.

T here was a writhing throng
waiting outside. Texas Rangers in
heavy riot armor held them back.
The press was in force with the
latest in light-weight helmet
cams. Locals and tourists gath-
ered to gawk — even in this day
and age, there were those who
preferred to be spectators. Then there was the nois-
iest group — the protesters.

They weren’t a united front. People were offended
by this event for a number of reasons:

Certain religious sects found the entire business
harmful to the spirituality of the planet.

Vegetarians objected to the blatant celebration of camivorism.
Animal rights groups didn’t like that poor, dumb animals were
being exploited.

Safety activists didn’t like that poor, dumb humans were allowed
to abuse themselves.

Then there was world-renowned paleontologist Pablo Redondo,
who had been extremely vocal on the world nets about the Tricer
Run’s negative effect on the science of paleontology in particular,
and the future of civilization in general. He was restating his argument
at the top of his lungs:

“These ‘tricers’ — so-called triceratopses — aren’t anywhere near
to being accurate recreations of any extinct species. In examining
their anatomical charts, I have found hundreds of mistakes and
downright alterations with the intent of making them more suitable
for this ridiculous excuse for a sport ing event!”

As usual, Traci was on the spot, interviewing anybody who was
anybody. “But what about the argument from many educators that
the Tricer Run is sparking the imaginations of children and their
desire to study science?” she asked with a predatory earnestness.

“Poppycock! This isn’t science! It’s pure spectacle! Bread and cir-
cuses! Was anybody ever inspired to improve himself by watching
organized brutality?”

Redondo went into a violent coughing fit. His assistants — all
young, attractive women — came to his aid, and pushed his wheel-
chair out of t he range of the cameras.

Frank took a deep breath, looked straight ahead and kept walking.
It was a normal walk, not a march or a strut. He found himself feel-
ing silly and a little embarrassed.

Smiling young people in costumes that were an awkward cross
between rinestone cowboy outfits and the bullfighter’s suit of lights
led him to his very own motorcycle. It was one of the new Lakota
Road Dog electrics with a superconducting engine.

Frank paused.

He had started riding motorcycles when he was courting Alma.

Those were the days of the earliest electrics. He still had fond mem-
ories of the Harley Thunderhead that he kept until well after Masako
was born. But of course, that had all ended with the accident ...

He had shattered the ball-and-socket joint in his left shoulder and
fractured his left hip. Masako had been too young to realize what had
happened; but Alma had been devastated. The Harley had been
destroyed. So had his career as a biker.

He had promised Alma he’d never do anything like that again. But
he hadn’t promised not to practice on a virtual reality program. After
all, you can’t break your neck in virtual reality . . .

His hands hovered inches from the motorcycle.

She had known that this adventure would involve his getting on a
motorcycle again. They hadn’t talked about it. But there had been
something in her eyes when she had given him her blessing ...

“Hey, Frankie-boy,” said Joe.

“Having second thoughts?” asked Juan.

“You aren’t planning on chickening out, are you, old man?” asked
Wole, with a smirk.

“Uh,” said Frank. “No. Actually, I was remember an old motorcy-
cle accident.”

“Reliving an old brash with the grim reaper?” said Joe.

“Kind of makes this whole thing more exciting,” said Juan.

“That’s it, Frankie-boy,” Wole slapped Frank on his back. “Get right
back on that horse!”

Suddenly Frank felt moisture on his neck. But it wasn’t sweat. It
was leaking in through the cracks in his armor.

Joe, Juan, and Wole abruptly took a few steps backward.

Frank took a step forward, a sort of hop he hadn’t done in years.
His hands met the grips. His body landed in the seat seemingly with-
out impact.

Joe, Juan, and Wole, and many of the people waiting in line behind
Frank broke into applause.

There was a hint of sarcasm in some of it, but Frank didn’t mind.
On the motorcycle, he felt younger, stronger, more powerful. Pow-
erful enough to run with the tricers.

When Pilar rewed her bike and looked back at tire assembled par-
ticipants, he believed that her eyes met his.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Traci’s voice rang through his helmet ear-
phones, “stall your engines and be ready to go — ” A massive rever-
beration almost drowned her out, so they amplified what came next:
“THE TRICERS ARE COMING!”

The Texan earth rambled.

Frank suppressed the urge to turn his head. Looking through his
rearviews, he saw the mounted horde behind him, and further back,
a huge cloud of dust.

“REMEMBER, NOW, Y’ALL DON’T WANT TO START OFF TOO
SOON. YA GOTTA LET THOSE BEASTS GET REAL CLOSE. YA
WANNA HAVE SOME SCRATCHES ON YOUR ARMOR TO TAKE
HOME.”

Homs soon became visible through the dust. They were long and
curved, strangely unlike those of the triceratopses everyone was
familiar with from decades of kiddie cartoons. As the promoters of
the event had said, “The tricer was the prehistoric equivalent of a bull
— except they were wild.”

Wild, yes. And powerful. Tenible.

There it was, creeping up Frank’s spine. Fear. Like the time years
ago, when he had found himself flying through the air, his bike slid-
ing away from him, a rough patch of pavement slamming toward him.
Once again, his life, images of Alma and Masako, flashed before him.
He could die. Today. He knew that.

Under the gauntlets his knuckles turned white. A bead of sweat
dripped down his goggles. His mouth went dry.

He could smell the approaching dust cloud, and tasted it as he
licked his lips. He could feel eveiy ponderous, saurian footfall rattling
his skeleton.

The rearview mirror shook, making it harder to see the homed
phantoms in the dust. There were hundreds of them, thundering
toward the widely spaced tricer runners, all straddling their Road
Dogs. Everyone was waiting stiffly. Some armored bodies were slrak-

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ing, and it had nothing to do with the rumbling earth.

A rider next to Frank took off, too soon.

His hands shook as he held it on neutral, gave the throttle a
squeeze; the superconducting electric engine purred viciously, daring
him to pop the clutch, let her rip.

No, he had spent a lot of money, had made everyone he knew and
loved doubt his sanity for this. He was determined to do it right. As
other runners sped by him, he stood there, waiting. Just waiting until
the tricers were right on top of him, close enough to scratch the sur-
face paint of his armor.

It didn’t take long.

Soon he could see their eyes, burning like orange coals in the after-
noon sun, cutting through the dust like shark’s teeth.

He never thought a triceratops’ eyes could be so terrifying. Several
pairs focused on him. Several trios of horn pointed at him.

The Fu Manchus stuck close by Frank. They almost seemed to be
herding him into the tricers. He wasn’t sure if they were a help or a
hindrance.

Just as he took off, he could feel hot tricer breath heating up
his armor.

He didn’t have time to feel proud. He had to keep up the speed
while avoiding thrusting horns and his fellow runners, some of whom
had become separated from their bikes. It was like rush hour Hon-
olulu traffic on fast forward.

He wasn’t sure if he could handle it, but he did anyway.

The Fu Manchus suddenly became tangled with a tricer. One of
them went flying, the other two skidded across the ground. Adrena-
line turned Frank’s fear into a supernova emotional high.

For a moment he was free and clear, by himself. He looked into his
rearview. A pair of inhuman eyes looked back at him. He couldn’t
look away from them; something about them had changed. It wasn’t
just the dust cutting down the sun reflection. Those eyes looked
softer, yet hotter. Smoldering. Frank didn’t know what it meant, but
he was horrified.

He felt it moving up next to him before he saw it. The tricer was
pacing him. At first, it. seemed as if it was just going to keep him com-
pany, just run alongside him as if he were part of the pack. Then it
dipped its horns, almost casually.

It picked its target with astonishing intelligence. The tricer hooked
Frank’s bike under the seat and the rear guard, lifting it so that the
rear wheel spun far from the ground. The tricer slowed down, then
came to a full stop.

Other tricers converged on them. Their eyes held Frank with
that strange, terrible gaze. He cut the engine and white-knuckled
the grips.

As the beasts stopped to surround Frank, bikes and riders went
falling and flying in the traffic snarl. Media helicopters circled
closer like flies to a rotting carcass. Human sweat mingled with
saurian calls.

But those calls were not the growling triceratopsian war ciy they
had all been trained to expect. This was more like very deep purring.
It was like the difference between the running noise of ancient gaso-
line engines and modem electric motorcycle engines.

The vibration from the tricer that was holding Frank’s bike went
right through the bike and armor, into his body.

He nearly wet himself.

In a sudden, instinctive panic, he released his death grip on
the bike. Not having realized where he was going, he stepped
out into midair and fell through the triceratops’ two upper horns,
onto its snout.

Lifting its great bony head, the tricer gently disengaged its horns
from the motorcycle. Then it began to gently rock Frank, who was
holding onto its leathery skin for dear life.

The other tricers were jostling close, a forest of horns moving
slowly, freakishly slowly, toward Frank. One of those horns pierced
Frank’s armor across his back. The beast underneath him stopped
purring and started roaring.

Pain suddenly came like a splash of molten lava, then melted into
inky blackness.

Once the blackness had evaporated, his eyes were scorched by
harsh lights. He was in a sterile bed, tied down with restraints. Tubes
and monitors penetrated his body at various intervals. The pain was
muffled with drugs, but it still hurt like hell.

“My god," a very, very familiar woman’s voice said. “His eyelids are
fluttering — there! He’s waking up.”

“Alma?” Frank asked, his voice cracking.

A hand wrapped around his. “Yes, honey, they shot me out here.”
“What?” He tried to focus his eyes.

“Do you think he’s ready for a pre-interview debriefing?” asked
another familiar female voice as a blur rushed toward him.

“Please," said the closer blur, who grew more and more to look
like Alma, “he needs rest!"

“What," Frank closed his eyes, and groaned, “happened.”

Alma gently squeezed his hand. “It was terrorists, Frankie."
“Gauchos Global sent in some disruption specialists,” said the
other blur, as it coalesced into Traci. “Remember those three guys
who were riding next to you? They sprayed you with female tricer
pheromones. The bulls were mesmerized by it. Lucky for you the
Texas Rangers got to you before they got too frisky. You could have
been loved to death." When she came the rest of the way into focus
she was leering.

So that was what Frank had felt on the back of his neck. Funny, but
he had soil of liked the effect. At least until the bulls had caught a
whiff of him.

“So it was the Fu Manchus." he said.

“That’s an inappropriate term," said Traci, with professional dis-
approval.

“I was talking about their moustaches, not their ethnicity.” Frank
was getting irritated.

“For god’s sake get out of here and get the doctor!” said Alma, grab-
bing Traci by the electronic devices attached to her collar and thrust-
ing her toward the door.

“But this is all very important!" Traci said as she was hurled out of
the room.

“Yeah, sure,” snarled Alma, slamming the door. She turned back to
Frank, softening with concern. “How do you feel, honey?"

“Like I’ve been run over by a truck," he groaned.

“They say it was the equivalent of several trucks.” She leaned onto
the bed and put a careful arm around him. “You’re lucky that armor
did its job."

Their lips were about to meet when the door burst open.

Pilar Felix trotted in, followed by a wake of paparazzi flashes and
humming microvidcams.

“Oh, Mister Frank Lazaro!" She rolled the r’s a little too much. “You
are the hero of the Tricer Run!" She leapt to the other side of the bed
with the grace of a ballet dancer and planted a kiss that Frank could
barely feel on his forehead. It left a bright lipstick trace, like a slightly
off-center third eye.

Frank looked at Alma and blushed.

“Sorry, I cannot visit with you longer," Pilar said, “but I have to
catch a suborbital. My fiance is waiting for me in Tangier.”

She, and her media swarm, disappeared as quickly as they had
appeared.

“Hero?” he said, to no one in particular.

“Yes, darling,” said Alma, and she kissed him good and proper. “It
seems that for the time being, you’re one of the world’s favorite fools.
Evetybody wants to talk to you. We’re going to have to hire you an agent”
“Great.”

“Even Masako is impressed. She talked her tribe into starting a
tricer ranch.”

“What about the evils of civilization?"

“I believe her answer was. A tribe’s gotta eat.’”

He laughed. It hurt.

“I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to write that novel, now that I
have an idea what its supposed to be about,” he said.

A nurse peeked in the door and asked. “Mr. Lazaro, would you like
to speak to the media now?”

He smiled for the cameras. That hurt, too. n

They came from Earth to solve a senseless murder. But
once on Mars, all they wanted was to stay alive.

I WONDER WHY THEY CALL THIS THE RED
planet?” I asked. The rebreather made
my voice sound funny in my ears.
“Looks like the brown planet to me.”
“You got a problem with brown,
boy?” Tally said. Her voice was muffled
by the rebreather she wore as well.

I turned, but Tally wasn’t looking
at me; she was watching the opposite
direction, standing in a half crouch. That
position surely couldn’t be comfortable,
but for her it looked completely easy and
natural. Her head turned with a quick
birdlike grace to glance now one way,
now the other. Guarding our backs, I
realized. Against what?

ion,” she said.

The more my eyes got used to the ter-
rain, the more colors came out. Brown,
yes, barren rocky brown plains and
brown buttes and a brown stream froth-
ing over a tiny waterfall. The hills were
sharp-edged, looking as if they had been
blasted out of bedrock the day before,
barely touched by erosion. But in the

brown were hints of other colors; a
sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing
the purple-gray of the cloudy sky, and
even patches on the rocks where the
amber shaded off to almost army green.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” said Leah
Hamakawa. She was, as always, two
steps ahead of us. She was down on one
knee in the dirt, her nose right up against
a rock. She’d taken both her gloves off
and was scraping the surface of the rock
inquisitively with her thumbnail.

I knelt down and scooped up a handful
of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close
up, I could see that the brown was an illu-
sion. The rocks themselves were the
color of brick, but clinging to them were
blotches of purple algae and tiny, dark
amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one
glove so I could feel the texture. Cold,
with a rough grittiness. When I nibbed it
between my fmgeis, the blotches of pur-
ple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try
pulling off the rebreather for a moment
so I could put it right up to my nose and
smell it, but decided that, considering the
absence of oxygen in the atmosphere,
that would not be wise.

“Beautiful, yeah, right,” Tally said. “You
got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks. I seen
prettier stinking strip mines.”

“It used to be red,” Leah said. “Long
ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before
the ecopoiesis.” She paused, then added
“I bet it was beautiful then, too."

I looked at the handful of dirt in my
palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beauti-
ful. In its way.

My ears and the flesh of my face in the
places not covered by the rebreather
were getting cold. The temperature was
above freezing, but it was still quite
chilly. The air in the rebreather was
stale, smelling slightly rotten and dis-
tinctly sulfurous. That indicated a prob-

lem with the rebreather; the micropore filters in the system should
have removed any trace of odor from the recycled air. I thought
again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what the air
smelled like.

“Shit,” said Tally. “Anyway, you and Tmkerman about done gawk-
ing the scenery? We got a murder to solve. Two murders.”

“They’ve been dead for well over a year,” Leah said. 'They can wait
another day. God, isn’t this place magnificent ?’’

“Stinks,” said Tally.

T he lander was bulbous and squat, painted
a pale green, with the name Albert Alligator
in cursive script next to the airlock door.
Leah and I cycled through the airlock
together. Langevin, the pilot who had shut-
tled us down, was waiting for us in the suit-
ing atrium when tire inner lock opened. He
opened his mouth to say something, and then
abruptly shut it, gagged, and turned away, his
hand going up to cover his mouth and nose.
He scrambled out of the atrium abruptly. I looked at Leah. She
shrugged, and reached up to unfasten the strap of the rebreather
from behind her head.

“Let me get that,” I said, and she turned around and bent her neck.
Any excuse to touch her. Behind me, I could hear Tally cycling through
the lock. Tire strap unfastened, and I gently took a finger and ran it
along Leah’s cheek, breaking the seal of tire rebreather to the skin.
Suddenly she broke away from me. “Oh, god!”

“What?"

“Take off your rebreather.”

Puzzled, I reached up, snapped tire strap free, and pulled it forward
over my head. The silicone made a soft “poik!” as the seal popped
loose. I took a breath, and gagged on the sudden odor.

The smell was as if I’d been wading through a cesspool in the mid-
dle of a very rotten garbage dump. I looked down. My shoes were cov-
ered in brown. My Sands were brown. One leg, where I’d knelt on the
ground, had a brown spot on the knee. Leah was even dirtier.

Shit.

Tally popped through the lock, accompanied by a fresh burst of
fecal odor. I held nry nose and suppressed my instinct to gag.

“Of course,” said Leah. “Anaerobic bacteria.” She thought for a sec-
ond. “We’re going to have to find some boots, and maybe overalls.
Leave them outside when we come in.”

I started to giggle.

“What’s so goddam funny?” Tally said.

“I’ve decided you’re right,” I told her. “Mars stinks. Take off your
rebreather. You’ll see."

The utility landing platform was a hexagonal truss plate
with small rocket engines mounted on three of the six comers. The
hab-and-lab module that Spacewatch was delivering for our stay was
strapped on the top. It hovered in the cloudy sky like a flying waffle
iron. Langevin guided it in by remote control, setting it down in the
sandy valley a hundred meters from the mins of the earlier habitat.

TERRAFORMED MARS HAD AN ATMOSPHERE HALF AS THICK AS
Earth’s. That was enough pressure for a human to survive, but with
no oxygen to breathe. With rebreathers to recirculate exhaust carbon
dioxide back into breathable oxygen, we could survive outside com-
fortably without a vacuum suit. For that matter, you could survive
outside stark naked, as long as you had your rebreather, and didn't
mind the cold.

Outside again, this time with boots and coveralls to keep the worst
of the stinking dirt out of our habitat, we walked in silence across the

His landing was as neat and as unconcerned as a man passing a plate
of potatoes. Still operating by remote control, he unstowed the power
crane, lifted the habitat off of the landing platform and lowered it
gently to the ground. The habitat itself was an unpainted aluminum
cylinder, fixed with brackets onto a platform with an electro-
mechanical jack at each comer to level it on uneven ground. It was
a small dwelling for three people, but would be adequate for our stay.

“Man, I don’t envy y’all,” he said. He delicately pinched two fingers
over his nose. “No surprise nobody comes here.” He shook his head.
“Anytliing else y’all need?”

“How about the rover?” Leah asked.

“It’s still in transit from the Moon; won’t arrive for a few more days.
When it gets here, I’ll send it right down.”

ALLY WAS FIRST ONE INSIDE THE HABITAT, OF COURSE. EVEN
though it had just come down from space, like a cat, she
had to sniff it out herself. After five minutes she waved
us in.

The ulterior of the habitat was brand new, the fixtures
molded to the interior. Across from the airlock atrium was the air
regeneration equipment, with three spherical pressure tanks painted
blue to indicate oxygen, and three green-painted tanks of nitrogen to
provide make-up gas. To the left was a combined conference room
and kitchen area, and behind that the sleeping cubbies.

“Only two cubbies,” Tally said, “and a mite cozy ones at that Guess
we girls bunk down in one; give you the other all to yourself, Tln-
kerman.”

I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Somehow I managed to sneak a
quick glance up. Tally wasn't looking at. me. She hadn’t yet realized
that the silence was extending a bit too long. Leah glanced across at
me. Her expression was neutral, curious, perhaps, as to what I would
do. I couldn’t read her intention. I never could,
hi a veiy small voice, I said, “I volunteer to share a bunk with Leah.”
Tally looked up sharply. Leah gazed back at her, her expression
unreadable. But she didn’t voice an objection.

“Hull,” said Tally. I don’t think I’d ever seen Tally at a loss for words.
“Well. Guess I get a cubby to myself.” She paused, and then added,
almost to herself, “Lucky me.”

rock-littered landscape the hundred meters to the place that the ear-
lier habitat had been. Ragged edges of aluminum stuck out from the
platform like ribs. Pieces of the habitat had been scattered across
the plain by the wind, a fan-tail of shining metal and shards of com-
posite sheeting visible against the brown all the way to the horizon.

There were two bodies, one within the remains of the exploded
habitat, one out on the plain. Not much was left of them. The bodies
were barely more than piles of dirt with a rib cage and part of a pelvis
protruding, even the bones covered with the purple-brown of the
Martian microbiota. I was glad for the filtering effect of the
rebreather. I made videos of the bodies in position while Leah knelt
down to examine them and take samples: clothing, hair, skin, tissue.
After she examined the one in the habitat, she rose without speaking
and went to the one outside. Unlike the other one, the clothing on this
one was partly eaten away by bacteria.

Leah’s long black hair blew around her face as she worked, but the
carbon-dioxide breeze wasn’t strong enough to move the pieces of
aluminum framework. The wind must have been much stronger to
have spread the wreckage so far.

Tally stood, as always, a dozen paces away, eyes restlessly scanning
the horizon for enemies.

“We really should have had a doctor to do this analysis,” Leah said,
standing up. “But a few things are obvious. For example, the man in
the habitat had a fractured skull.”

“What?”

“But this one,” she nodded down at the body she was standing over,
“shows no apparent sign of trauma. No rebreather, either, so I’ll haz-
ard a guess that carbon dioxide poisoning was what did for him.”
Leah put the tissue samples into her sample-pack and took a step
toward the habitat. “I’ll have to let the computer analyze the samples
to verify that, of course.” She looked around. “Who could have killed
them? Why?” She looked up the plain, following the trail of debris. “I
think we’ve seen enough. Tinkerman, you have enough pictures?
Does your checklist have anything else?”

I looked down at tire list. “No, as far as forensics is concerned,
we’re done.”

“Then, unless you have any further suggestions, do you think
maybe we could get them decently buried?”

When there’s a fatal incident in space, of whatever kind, there
needs to be an investigation. If it was an accident, the cause has to
be found so that Spacewatch Authority can take appropriate mea-
sures to prevent its recurrence, and deliver warning t o anybody else
with similar equipment.

We were that incident investigation team, Leah and I. Tally, a free-
lance survival specialist, was our protection. If somebody had killed
the two researchers, deliberately blown up their habitat for some as-
yet undetermined motive, whoever it was that had killed them might

But nobody cared about Mars. The exciting horizons were light-
years away, where relativistic probes lasercast. back terabits of
images, giving the excitement of vistas that anybody could access on
opt ical disk without the danger and discomfort of leaving Earth, and
with far stranger life forms than any mere microbes. Mars was such
an uninteresting location that it took over a year before Spacewatch
Authority noticed that a scientific team that had gone there to study
microbes hadn’t returned. They were the first researchers to bother
with an on-site investigation of Mai's in over a century.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I told Leah, back in the habitat. “Why
would anybody want to murder two researchers on a stinky planet
too close to Earth to even be interesting?"

She shrugged. “Kooks. Bacteria-worshippers. Or, maybe one of ’em
had an angiy ex.”

“It’s not as if the planet were exciting,” I said. “They tried to ter-
raform it. They failed. End of stoiy, go home.”

“Failed? Tinkennan, you have it all wTong. You should go learn a
little history before going on a trip." I could hear her switching into
lecture mode. “They didn’t try to t erraform Mars. They never tried to
terraform Mars. What they did was ecopoiesis, and they succeeded
spectacularly, more than anybody had a right to expect.”
“Ecopoiesis,” I said, “terraforming, same tiling.”

“Not at all.”

he way Leah told it, it was part epic, part farce.

It’s hard for us, now, to imagine what it was like in the
Age of Confusion, before the fusion renaissance and the
second reformation, but the people of the twenty-first cen-
tury had a technology of chemical rockets and nuclear
reactors that, although primitive, had its own crude power. By the
middle of the twenty-first century, Mars had been explored, cata-
loged, and abandoned. It was too cold to harbor life, even of the most
primitive sort; the atmosphere was closer to vacuum than to air, and
there were far more accessible resources in the asteroids. Mars was
uninteresting.

It didn’t even make good video. The largest canyon in the solar sys-
tem — so big that if you stand in the middle, the walls on both sides

were out of sight over the horizon. The biggest mountain in the solar
system — but the slope so gentle that it meant nothing on any human
scale. Ancient fossil bacteria — but not even a hint of anything that
hadn’t been dead and turned to rock a billion years before trilobites
crawled the oceans. A hundred spots on Earth and across the solar
system were more spectacular. Once somebody had climbed Olym-
pus (and in the low gravity of Mars it wasn’t a hard climb), and had
placed flags at both poles of Mars, why go back?

The ecopoiesis of Mais was done by a band of malcontents from
one of the veiy first space sett lements, Freehold Toynbee. Habitats —
they called them “space colonies" back then — were crowded, dan-
gerous, undersupplied, constantly in need of repair, and smelly. They
were haven to malcontents, ideologues, fanatics, and visionaries: the
vanguard of humanity, the divine agents of the manifest destiny of
mankind into the universe. More succinctly, the habitats were home
to people who couldn’t get along with their fellow humans on Earth.
Arguments were their way of life.

It was an engineer named Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick who proposed
that Toynbee could transform Mars. The people of Toynbee debated
the question for a year, arguing every conceivable point of view with
a riotous enthusiasm. At the beginning, the consensus of the colony
seemed to be that since human destiny was in space, even to consider
living on planetary surfaces could only be idiocy, or some deviant
plot to subvert that destiny. But Kirkpatrick was more than just a
maverick engineer with wild dreams, he was a man with a divine mis-
sion. A year later, the quibble about living on a planetary surface
I wasn’t even part of the argument. Toynbee decided that the right of
Mai's to remain unchanged was preempted by the imperative of life
to spread into new niches. They had convinced themselves that they
had not merely a right, but a divine duty to seed life on Mars.

Mars, back then, was completely inhospitable to life. The atmos-
phere was less than one percent of the Earth’s, and the average tem-
perature was far below freezing, even at the equator. But their analy-
sis showed that the climate of Mars just might be unstable. The
surface of Mars showed networks of canyons and run-off channels,
diy lakes and the seashores of ancient oceans. There had been water
on Mars, once, a billion years or more ago, and plenty of it. All that
water was still there, hidden away. The old scientific expeditions had
proven that — frozen in the polar ice-caps, locked into kilometer-
thick hills of permafrost in the highlands. They convinced themselves
that there was, in fact, far more water on Mars than previously sus-
pected, frozen into enormous buried glaciers under featureless fields
of sand. Enough to form whole oceans — if it could be melted. All
that was needed was a Digger.

It’s not easy to heat up a planet, even temporarily. They did it by
setting off a volcano. There were a number of ancient volcanoes
on Mars to choose from; after many geological soundings to deter-
mine magma depth, they picked a small one. Or rather, a volcano
small by Mars standards, still a monster by the standards of any
Earthly mountains. Hecates Tholus; the Witch’s Teat. To set it off,
they determined, required that they drill five kilometers deep into
the crust of Mara.

Just because it was clearly impossible was no reason they wouldn’t
do it. Mara has no magnetic field, and so the solar wind impacts
directly on the planetary exosphere. A thousand miles above Mare,
currents of a billion amperes course around the planet, driven by the
solar wind-derived ionization. Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick and his team
of planetary engineers short-circuited this current with a laser beam,
ionizing a discharge channel through the atmosphere, creating the
solar system’s largest lightning bolt. They discharged the ionosphere
of Mara into the side of Hecate, instantly creating a meter-deep pool
of molten rock. And then they did it again. And again, as soon as the
ionospheric charge had a chance to renew. And again, a new lightning
bolt every five minutes, day and night, for ten years.

One million lightning discharges, all on exactly on the same spot.
They melted a channel through to tire magma chamber below, and a
volcano that had been sleeping for almost half a billion years awak-
ened in a cataclysmic explosion. The eruption put carbon dioxide and
sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; more importantly, it shot a hun-

dred billion tons of ash directly into the stratosphere. Over the course
of several months, the ash settled down, blackening the surface.

The new, darker surface absorbed sunlight, warming the planet
and releasing adsorbed carbon dioxide from the soil. The released
carbon dioxide thickened the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect
of the thicker atmosphere warmed the planet yet more. The result-
ing heat evaporated water from the polar ice caps into the atmos-
phere. Water in the atmosphere is an effective greenhouse gas, even
more effective than carbon dioxide, and so the temperature rose a lit-
tle more. Finally ice trapped underground for eons melted. A whole
hemisphere of Mars was flooded, eventually to form the vast Boreal
Ocean, as well as innumerable crater seas and ponds. But that was
much later. In the beginning, in Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick’s lifetime,
only on a band around the equator was water actually liquid all year
round. But that was enough for what they wanted to do. Slowly, the
eons-frozen permafrost of Mars was melting.

The atmosphere was still thin, and still almost entirely carbon diox-
ide, but Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Sulfur dioxide frozen into the
soil was also released, and rose into the atmosphere. Ultraviolet light
from the sun photolyzed the sulfur dioxide into free radicals, which
recombined to form sulfuric acid, which instantly dissolved into the
new equatorial oceans . The new acid oceans attacked the ancient
rocks of Mars, etching away calcium carbonate and magnesium car-
bonate, releasing carbon dioxide. In a few years, the acid oceans had
been once more neutralized — and the atmosphere was thick, fully
half a bar of carbon dioxide, enough for a greenhouse effect warm
enough to keep the new oceans liquid year round.

Mars had been triggered.

But how to keep tliis new atmosphere, to keep the planet warm?
Not even Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick could keep a volcano erupting
forever, and already the Witch’s Teat was settling down from an
untamed explosion of ash to a sedate mound of slowly oozing lava.

Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick’s answer was bacteria. Anaerobic bac-
teria, to live in the oxygen-free atmosphere of Mars.

“Sewer bacteria,” I said.

“You got it, Tinkerman. Anaerobic bacteria — modified sewer
organisms. Yeasts, slime-molds, cyanobacteria, methanogens and
halophiles as well; but all in all, bacteria closer to gangrene than to
higher life.”

“No wonder it stinks.” I shuddered. “They were crazy.”

“Not so. They were, in fact, very clever. They engineered a whole
anaerobic ecology. The bacterial ecology darkened the surface, tak-
ing over tlie job of the volcanic ash. It burrowed into file rocks and
broke them apart into soil, releasing absorbed carbon dioxide in the
process. The methanogens added methane, a vitally important green-
house gas, to that atmosphere, and raised the temperature another
few degrees. They didn’t dare establish too many photosynthetic
forms, of course, because if file carbon dioxide in file atmosphere
were to be converted into oxygen, the greenhouse effect that kept the
planet warm would vanish, and the planet would return to its life-
less, frozen state.

“But terraforming Mars hadn’t been their goal in file first place; in
fact, terraforming was the very antithesis of what they intended. Their
goal was ecopoiesis, file establishment of an ecology. They were Dar-
winists, and diversity was their creed. They looked down in contempt
on unimaginative humans who believed that humans were the pin-
nacle of creation; they saw humanity as only agents of life, spore-
pods by which life could jump from one world to another. They
believed that once life, however primitive, could establish a toehold
on Mars, it would adapt to its environment, and flourish, and some-
day evolve. Not to make a copy of Earth, but into something new,
something indigenously Martian.”

“So they wanted to be gods.”

Leah shook her head. “They wanted to be men."

“So they’re responsible for this place. Great.”

“The ecopoiesis was a wonder in its day, Tinkerman. It spawned
debate across file Earth and cis-lunar space: was this the greatest
feat of engineering in history, or was it a crime against nature? The
year of arguing at Freehold Toynbee was nothing compared to file

cyclonic fervor that was released when Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick
proudly announced to the Earth what they had done.

“Kirkpatrick was kidnapped from Toynbee and put on trial in
Geneva as an eco-criminal. The question the High Court argued was,
Do Rocks Have Rights? Can it be a crime to destroy an ecosystem
that contains no life? The trial took three years, and ended in a hung
jury. Kirkpatrick was eventually acquitted of all charges, but he was
never allowed to leave the Earth again, and died an angry, bitter man.

“ Freehold Toynbee claimed ownership of Mars, and passed a law
making it illegal for any human to land on it for the next billion
years — but nobody paid any attention to 1 heir claim. For decades,
Mars was the subject of intense scientific scrutiny. In a few more
years Toynbee went bankrupt, for ecopoiesis paid no bills. Tech-
nologically obsolete, the colony itself was ripped apart for scrap;
the colonists scattering to a hundred colonies and asteroid settle-
ments. And then, after a few decades of fame, Mais was ignored.
Bacteria or no bacteria, there were far more abundant resources
elsewhere in the solar system.”

“And if two researchers hadn’t decided to die here, it would still be
uninteresting today.”

“Not uninteresting, no. Ignored, maybe. But not uninteresting.”
“To you.”

Leah smiled. “To me.”

ANGEVIN TOOK THE LAN DER BACK UPSTAIRS, FLY-
ing fire utility platform in formation with him,
leaving us alone on the planet. We were in the
tiny kitchen area of the habitat, sitting around
the only table large enough to serve as a con-
ference area. Leah spoke first. “Tally, did you
learn anything?”

“After almost two ye;irs,” Tally said, “did you
really, seriously believe any footprints of the
perpers would be left preserved? Well, sur-
prise.” She grinned. “Yeah, I found some boot prints. Took me some
looking, let me tell you, but I found 'em.”

“So tell,” Leah said. “What did you get?”

“A few places in file lee of the rocks didn’t get washed away by
rain or blurred by wind.” Tally shook her head. “But I checked them
all; every damn print matches the size and patterns of one of file boots
in the hab. Either whoever did it used the same boots as our late
friends, or, more likely, whoever did it didn’t leave any boot prints.
That’s all I’ve got. You?”

Leah spoke slowly. “The one in the hab dic'd from being hit in the
head. The other one died outside. No rebreather in evidence, and he
wasn’t dressed for outside. Just a thin robe. Carbon dioxide poison-
ing, as I expected.”

“Hmm,” said Tally. “Two guys sleeping in file same cubby. Ask me,
I’d call it as a lover’s quarrel gone violent. The one guy bashes file other
in a fit of rage, probably didn’t mean to hit quite so hard. Then, realiz-
ing what he did, he blows up the habitat and walks outside to die.”
“Could be,” Leah said. “It’s a hypothesis, anyway. Can’t prove it one
way or another with file evidence we have so far. One odd thing, file
man who died outside had charred clothing.”

That explained the ragged appearance of the clothing of file man
who had been outside. His clothes hadn’t been eaten by bacteria; they
had been charred.

“Maybe caught alight when he blew the habitat?” Tally suggested.
Leah shook her head. “Carbon dioxide and methane atmosphere.
Nothing bums, outside.”

“Um,” Tally said. “Guess I don’t have an explanation for that one.”
“Tinkerman?” Leah said. “You get anything?”

I shook my head. “I collected as much of their records as f could
find, but so far I can’t read them. A lot of their opticals were damaged
by fire, and on the ones that weren’t, the surfaces are pretty corroded
by exposure. I’ve started cleaning them off, and I may be able to get
at some of their records, but, even if I can do it, reading it will be
pretty much a bit by bit process. They weren’t veiy conscientious at
making backups and pulling them in a secure location, I’m afraid.”

“Pity. If we could read their diaries, it would help, let us see if any-
thing was going wrong before the blow-up. Oh, well. Do what you
can, and we’ll get together again tomorrow and check progress.”

As we talked, Leah’s face had slowly been reddening. Her eyes
were pale circles; her nose and lips and chin, where the rebreather
had covered them, a pale diamond. The rest of her face slowly turned
a brilliant scarlet, deepening even as I watched. She raised a hand and
brushed her hair away from her face. “Ouch.” She looked puzzled.

Reflexively, I raised a hand to my temple. My own touch was like
a whip, a brilliant stab of heat.

Tally looked at tire two of us, grinning. “Well, well, aren’t you two
the sight. Look like you’re wealing warpaint Painted up like two
owls, you are.”

Tally’s dark skin showed nothing, but Leah reached over and gen-
tly touched her face.

‘Tow! Hey, that hurts! Shit!”

“Ultraviolet,” Leah said. “It’s the hard ultraviolet. C0 2 is too diffi-
cult for UV to split; it doesn’t form an ozone layer. The climate is
cloudy and cold, but tire hard UVs still get right down to the surface.
I’d say, we’ve been a bit stupid, going out unprotected. Good thing we
weren’t out much longer.”

“Shit,” said Tally. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“The hab has to have some kind of a med kit,” Leah said. “Maybe
we’d better see if it has any sunburn ointment.”

Damn.

T NIGHT, IN THE CUBBY. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT
to expect.

She wasn’t in the bunk. She was sitting in
the cubby’s one small chair, staring into
space. I got into the bunk, on one side, mak-
ing a space for her.

She didn’t move. Fifteen minutes. Half an
hour.

I’d done something wrong. But she hadn’t
objected! I thought —

The silence in the cubby was oppressive.

At last I said, “Leah?”

She said nothing.

“Leah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to try to — ”

In the dark it was hard to tell where her eyes focused, but I could
see the slight movement of her head and knew that she was looking
.at me.

“David.” She paused for a moment, and just before I was about to
speak again, to apologize to her, she continued, “I’ve seen bodies
before.”

It was not what I’d expected her to say. “Bodies?”

“I thought I was used to it.” Her voice was tiny in the darkness. “I
drought I could handle it. I can handle it.”

It was odd. Tire bodies hadn’t bothered me. They had been so far
decomposed that they were barely recognizable as having been
human at all. And they hadn’t seemed to botirer her, not in dre daytime.

“I’ve seen too many bodies.” And then she came into bed, turning
to face away from me. I held her. Her body was rigid, but she turned
her face and pressed her head into my side. “Too many, too many.”
Her breath was warm against my shoulder. “It wasn’t even anybody
I knew. I’m sorry. I’m Sony. I’m going to stop crying now.”

I touched her face. Her eyes were dry, but somewhere inside she
seemed to be crying.

“I don’t even know why I’m still alive,” she said. “Everybody else
died.”

I didn’t know what to say to her, so I stroked her hair and said, “I
know, I know 7 .”

“Careful how 7 you touch me, you idiot,” she said, and her tone was
back to normal. “My whole face feels like it’s on fire.”

I knew so little about her. She never talked about herself; she so
deftly managed to always avoid the subject. She had always seemed
so much in control. But suddenly she was asleep, and the time for
asking questions had passed.

I ’VE HEARD THAT SOME PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.
It took me about three classes.

The first one, I don’t think I even noticed her in par-
ticular, just another face among tire many. I was teach-
ing a class on troubleshooting. There are two techniques
to troubleshooting equipment. The first is, you know the
equipment so thoroughly that you have a sense of it, you
know it as a friend, and when it’s down, you can feel
what’s wrong by pure instinct. That method is rather
hard to teach.

The other way is to be simple, thorough and logical; to home
in on the problem by pure mechanical elimination, a matter of
dogged and willfully unimaginative technique. That was the tech-
nique 1 was teaching. It means teaching how to be methodical,
how to structure a grid to let no combination of symptoms
escape detection.

The Institute has simple rules: everybody teaches, everybody
learns. Every year, during the Earth’s northern-hemisphere summer,
the Institute holds a month-long convocation, and this year I was
teaching. My class lasted only a week, and it was almost half over
before I really noticed Leah.

But, once I’d noticed her, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The
breeze rustled across pine needles, and I heard the sound of her
voice, asking a question, precise, cogent, perfectly phrased. I’d see the
way she cocked her head, listening. I became suddenly self-con-
scious, worried about how I presented the material, whether it was
clear and precise.

So, when I finished, I sat in on her course, although it was some-
what out of my usual feeding range. Soliton-wave solutions of the
Einstein field equations. I’m slow; my lips move when I solve field
equations in four dimensions. She was a lot faster than the class, so
smooth that it was obvious that she knew the material so well she
didn’t even bother to review it before she started talking.

I knew that once the convocation had ended, I would never see
her again. The thought made me desperate, although I’d not spoken
more than a half dozen words to her beyond what was required of a
student. I knew absolutely nothing of her other than her name, Leah
Hamakawa, and the obvious fact that she knew more about general
relativity than I would be able to learn in a lifetime. I had to do some-
tiring that would get her attention.

I invited her to come with me to visit old Los Angeles.

Tire month after tire convocation is traditionally a time for vacation
and independent study, before we went back to our individual lives,
hiring out as Institute-bonded technicians or consultants or trouble-
shooters. I had no idea whether she’d be interested in a trip to OLA;
it was a wild shot to try to impress her.

But her eyes had suddenly flared with interest, and, for the first
time, she looked at me and actually saw me. “Old LA? Interesting.
Have you been there?”

I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t, so I temporized. “I know a
good guide.”

OLA was one of tire most dangerous, and certainly the oddest, of
the ecosystems on the Earth. Back at the end of the second Eliza-
bethan age, tire doomed city had been the home of a dozen or more
gene-splicing laboratories, corporations that had made synthetic
retroviruses to replace flawed DNA with custom-designed synthetic,
right inside the chromosome of tire target organism. Other cities had
such labs, too, of course, and Los Angeles hadn’t even been the most
prominent of them. Just tire unluckiest.

The virus that had gotten free was a generic gene-splicer. It
would copy snippets of genes at random out of airy host organism
it happened to infect. As soon as it vectored to another host, it
would make a billion copies of itself, and of its copied DNA, copy
the genes back into a likely spot in the genome of the new host,
and then start over again from the beginning by grabbing a snip-
pet of DNA from the new host. As a parting gift to the new organ-
ism, it would then trigger the cell’s own enzyme promoters to
express the DNA.

The fact that retroviruses copy DNA from one organism to another

is a natural process, of course; just a part of the mechanics of evolu-
tion. The rogue virus had the effect of a million years of evolution, set
loose in a single day: chaos.

Most of the additions to the genome were meaningless changes,
genes which coded neither useful nor harmful proteins. Most of the
changes that had effect were dysfunctional, and killed the hosts over
the course of a few days or weeks, if they were lucky, or produced

other pieces in the distance. Aerial photos taken as we had landed
helped locate the more distant fragments, but didn’t substitute foi
plain, dogged walking.

The job took a lot of walking. The camp was located on the Syr-
tisian isthmus. This was a broad saddle that separated the Hel-
lenian Sea from Gulf of Isidis, a bay of the Boreal Ocean which
covered nearly the entire northern hemisphere of Mars. To the

an explosion of cancers that killed the host over the course of
months, if not so lucky. Over the course of the first year a great die-
off occurred.

The things that survived were — strange. The rogue vims had
indiscriminately cut and pasted genes with no notion of species;
what came out of the mingling were neither humans nor animals nor
plants, but weird mixtures: predatory plants, octopuses with hands,
tiger-sized raccoons that knew how to use guns, social bacteria that
drew recondite, hypnotic patterns across deserted beaches. The
thrown-together quarantine barriers held, barely, and the hastily
mobilized scientific effort to combat the virus devised a specific
antiviral protein that knocked out the rogue virus’s ability to repro-
duce. The plague was stopped before it spread outside the bound-
aries of what had been Los Angeles.

Inside the hundred-mile ring, surrounded by scorched sand and
silent, instant death, what had once been Los Angeles was still evolv-
ing toward a new ecosystem. There was no place more deadly, or
more strange. The retrovirus itself was gone, but the creatures it had
spawned remained. You could go there, if you signed a waiver indi-
cating that you knew the danger and were aware that there was no
guarantee that you would come back.

The guide I had been told about was a mysterious survival spe-
cialist and weapons expert named Tally Okumba. Nobody, I was told,
knew more about OLA, or about any of the odd, dangerous comers
of the Earth, than Tally did; and nobody knew more about staying
alive, on Earth or elsewhere.

“Old LA," Leah said. Her eyes were veiled, dreaming. “When do
we leave?"

I N THE LIGHT OF THE DAWN, TALLY WAS DANCING, HIGH KICKS,
spins and backflips in the low gravity. Over her rebreather, her
face was covered with a bone-white warpaint that, after a
moment, I realized was an improvised sun-block. I watched her
through the habitat’s window, and wondered how long she had
been at it. Her flexibility was astonishing.

Leah did not mention what she’d said the night before, and I didn’t
bring it up.

The task for the day was to gather up shards of the shattered habi-
tat and as much of the wind-scattered contents as we could find. Leah
and I worked mostly in silence, occasionally pointing out to each

northwest the land sloped gently upward toward the Syrtis
caldera, an ancient shield volcano, dead now for well over a bil-
lion years. An endless series of lava-etched rilles corrugated the
landscape from northwest to southeast, each with a tiny brown
stream at the bottom. The wind that scattered the pieces of the
habitat had, in accord with Murphy’s law, been crosswise to the
rilles, meaning that we had to trek up and down innumerable gul-
lies to collect the fragments.

“It must, have been some wind," Leah said. “Blowing pretty con-
stantly from the Hellenian Sea toward the Gulf, apparently.”

The carbon dioxide atmosphere was still now, with barely a trace
of breeze.

By local noon we had made a large collection of pieces. I took a
break and sat on a rock by one of the streams. The brook foamed
as it rippled over submerged rocks. Amber bubbles clumped
together, then detached and floated downstream. The stream
looked like an alcoholic’s vision of paradise: a river of ice-cold beer,
flowing down into a lake of beer, emptying somewhere into a frigid
ocean of beer —

“Well, yes — what did you think that the rivers are?” Leah said,
when I mentioned the thought to her. She was wearing a makeshift
sunbonnet const ructed from piloting charts; even with her face hid-
den by a rebreather and caked with bum ointment, she was st un-
ningly beautiful. I wondered what it would be like to peel off her
winter garments, to make love to her right there by the stream. “By
any practical definition, it is a river of beer. Yeast is an anaerobic
microorganism — the stuff that the ecopoiesis team seeded this
planet with will ferment just about everything. Naturally carbonated,
too: five hundred millibars of carbon dioxide atmosphere is going to
dissolve a hell of a lot of carbonation into the water at this temper-
ature. I’d bet that if you brought a glass of that stuff inside it would
develop a pretty good head.”

“You mean I could drink this stuff?”

Leah looked at it critically. “Hmmm. You know, you just might be
able to. Full of bacteria, I expect, but if our anti-biologicals aren’t
working, we’re already dead anyway, so I doubt it’s a problem. Tell
you what.” She looked up at me. “You try it, and let me know.”

I didn’t.

By midaftemoon, we had gathered as much of the debris as we
could find. Eveiything that looked like it might have originally been

part of the habitat pressure vessel, Leah set out in a array next to the
site of the explosion. Each piece was numbered, and then Leah began
fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“There are some minor pieces missing, but I think we’ve pretty
much got everything important," she said at last.

I walked up behind her and looked at the neatly-indexed array of
scrap. “What have you learned?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t tell me a story, yet.” She picked up
a piece and handed it to me. “Tell me what you think about this one.”

It was a curved piece of aluminum, forty centimeters long, some-
what bent. “Exterior habitat pressure-vessel wall,” I said.

“Right so far. What else?”

The piece had broken at a seam at one edge. Shoddy workman-
ship? Probably not; the other end had ripped jagged right across; tire
weld had probably never been designed for the stress it must have
taken. It was bent in the middle. Tire jagged end had a scrape of paint
on the raw metal. “Blue paint chips on the end here,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “And the bend?”

It took nre a moment, but suddenly I saw it. “Bent the wrong way,”
I said. “It bowed in. The explosion should have blown it out." I
drought for a moment. “Could have been bent by Bre wind, later.”

She nodded, tiroughtful. “Possibility. There are other pieces bent
the same way, though.”

“How much overpressure would it take to bend it drat way?”

“Good question,” she said. “If we could figure the overpressure as
a function of position, we can guess the locus of the blast. Turns out,
though, that it doesn’t take much blast pressure to make the habitat
structure fail this way. The pressure vessel was designed to hold an
interior pressure; it’s not well designed against an external over-
pressure.”

“So, what do you think?”

“It might have failed in the rarefaction rebound following the over-
pressure of an explosion," she said. “Microstmctural examination
might tell. Might not.”

“Or die explosion was outside the habitat.” That would make sense.
If somebody had wanted to kill the team, the easiest way to do it
would have been to put a bomb next to the shelter.

Leah shook her head and chose another piece to hand to me
another. “Carbon deposits,” she said.

I looked at it and nodded. The bum marks were on the concave
side, the interior. “Fire after the blast?” I suggested.

She nodded, but slowly. “Could be, I suppose. But after die habitat
breach, everything vents to the reducing atmosphere. Fire goes out
pretty quick."

“If it was murder,” Leah said, “Who might have done it?”

We were sitting back in the little conference room. My whole face

itched now, despite die ointments that Tally had devised for sunburn.
My face felt like I was still wearing the rebreather.

“Hard to say,” Tally said. “I suppose either one of ‘em might have
had enemies. If it wasn’t personal, I’ve got a few possibilities. First,
before they went, turns out they got a couple of anonymous mes-
sages saying not to go. The point was, Mars was property of Freehold
Toynbee, and it was reserved for the Martians, however long it took
them to appear. Humans were expressly forbidden to land.”

“Toynbee!" Leah said. “They were dissolved more than a century
ago. Bankrupt and sold for scrap. Besides, lots of researchers have
visited Mars.”

Tally nodded, slowly. “A century ago, yes. I doubt anybody been
here in the last hundred years, though, except our poor friends.
Seems hard to believe anyone would still care. A nut, I’d say. Still, a
nut might be what we’re looking for.”

“And the otiier possibilities?”

“Turns out that tiiere are still some people," Tally said, “who dunk
that ecopoiesis is usurping the role of God. And some who think tiiat
ecopoiesis is, or was, a crime against die ecosystem. And there’s been
talk t hat if Mars could be triggered, then other planets, in other solar
systems, could be. Some of these have life of their own, incompati-
ble with terrestrial life. So, some radicals, they don’t want Mars stud-
ied. They’re scared that any studying of Mars is a step to triggering
planets in other solar systems. There are those who would like to
stop that. Stop it early, and stop it at any cost.

“And, finally, there are those who worry about Mars, worry that
this ecopoiesis might just be another LA waiting to happen.” She
shrugged. “Me, I rather like old LA. Got that, kind of raw charm you
don’t see much in other cities nowadays. But I know that not every-
body thinks like me.”

“I see,” said Leah. “And which of these would have set a bomb?”

Tally shrugged. “Any of diem. Or all of them, working together.”

“Working together? Logically, the Toynbees and die eco-radicals
are enemies.”

Tally smiled. “Logically, we’re not precisely talking rational peo-
ple here.”

“So what do we have?”

“See, are we even sure it was a bomb?” Tally said. “Tinkennan, you
find any suspicious pieces of pyrotechnic?”

I shook my head. “Nothing yet. But I don’t know much about
bombs. I might have missed something.”

“Me neither,” Tally said. “And I do know about bombs, I do. A bit.”

L eah Hamakawa was completely opaque to me. I never
had a clue what she was thinking, what she felt or thought
about me. Sometimes her gaze would wander over me and
stop, and she would look at me, not witii a question, not
with an invitation, just a look, calm and direct. I wished I
knew what she was contemplating.

I wished I knew why I was so attracted to her.

The dip to Old IA had been a cusp in our relationship. On the trip
we had just been fellows, co-adventurers and notiling more. After-
ward, Leah accepted die fact that I tagged along after her as just a
facet of the environment, hardly worth commenting on. We’re not,
actually, a team, although it must seem like it to others. Leah was the
hotshot scientist, and, well, every team needs a tech and a pilot.
Eventually she had noticed.

“Look," Leah had said. “You’re as skittery as a colt, you’re stam-
mering, I can’t get one full grammatical sentence out of you in a cart-
load, and you’re so nervous I’m sure you’re going to break sometiiing.
Do you want to sleep with me? Is that it?”

Her gaze was direct. It was always direct.

I couldn’t say anything. I had trouble closing my moutii.

“If you do,” she said, “fine, do it, or don’t do it, I don’t care, just will
you quit stumbling around.”

And, later, after she’d taken off her clothes, she said, “Just don’t
think it means something, okay? I couldn’t stand that.”

But it did. Maybe not to her, but to me.

And so we came to Mars. When die authorities had finally noticed

that the missing science team had stopped filing status reports to
Spacewatch, and the orbital eye they sent to report got, a break in the
heavy Martian cloud cover and saw pieces of the habitat spread
across ten kilometers of landscape — a “presumed fatal malfunc-
tion,” as it was reported, Spacewatch had asked for Leah; she had a
rep for unraveling tough balls of fur, and I scrambled to rate the slot
to go along. Not that this was so hard; I had my skills, piloting and
mechanics and, yes, troubleshooting, and most crews were glad to
have me aboard! In this investigation, the third slot on the team was
special, in case the accident we were investigating was no accident
at all, and the perpetrators might not be finished. The third slot
needed a professional paranoid.

We both knew exactly the survival expert who was right for that
place.

“Still hanging ‘round with that long-legged white girl, I see,” Tally
had greeted me, when I came to ask if she wanted to join the team.
“Give it up, boy, she’s too good for you.”

“Don’t I know it,” I’d said.

But that was the past, and brooding over the past wasn’t going
to get me to bed, or explain Leah Iiamakawa to me. She had
undressed without the least trace of self-consciousness and gotten
into the cubby’s tiny bed. I undressed, with a lot more trepidation,
and lay down beside her. She turned and watched me with a pel-
lucid gaze, free of any emotion I could interpret. She wouldn’t let
me understand her, but for whatever reason of her own, she would
let me love her.

For the moment, that would have to be enough.

T he next day I worked on decoding the data from the
damaged opticals, while Leah put together the jigsaw puz-
zle of the exploded habitat pieces, and Tally ranged in ever
wider loops from the habitat, exploring. I succeeded in
getting large blocks of data, but nothing was of any evi-
dent value: lengthy descriptions of bacteria, lists of bacteria count per
square millimeter in a hundred different habitats.

“Here’s something,” Leah said. “Take a look at my collection of

metals. But, no steel in the pieces here. And, take a look here.” She
chose a piece out of the pile and handed it to me. It was a damaged
recording unit. The capstan flopped loose in the absence of the steel
axle it should have rotated on. She handed me another, a piece with
a neat hole where a steel grommet should have fit.

“Does that mean anything?”

She shrugged. “Who can tell? Probably not.”

“Any steel fixtures hold pressure?”

Leah shook her head. “I checked the plans. No, all the iron and
steel parts are incidentals. No steel penetration of the pressure hull . ”

Tally came back from her scouting, and looked at us both. “You
are working too hard,” she said. “It’s time for a break. Way past time * .
you ask me. And I know just the thing.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Here.” She handed me a sheet of aluminum. It was about a meter
long, slightly curved, one side coated with a carbon composite fac-
ing. In a comer “117 Outer” was written in Leah’s neat printing. A
panel from the outer skin of the exploded habitat. A mounting flange
with a hole for bolting interior fixtures was at one end. She handed
another one to Leah. “Sure you don’t need these panels, now?” she
asked Leah.

“Already looked at them.” Leah shook her head. “That was the side
opposite the explosion. Nothing but jimk, now."

After we had suited up for outside and smeared one another’s faces
white with sunblock, we each took a panel, and Tally led us up to the
top of the ridge that rose above the habitat. The hill surface was com-
posed of sand held in place with a thin veneer of purple-brown algae,
slick as powdered Teflon. We had to choose our footing carefully to
avoid skidding back down.

It was a gorgeous day. From the ridge, the marscape appealed
striped, brown and purple strips in alternation all the way to the
horizon. The purple was the algae, covering the sunnier face of
each ridge; the brown anaerobic scum colonizing the shadier back
face. The characteristic north-south wind pattern was clearly man-
ifest in the form of long streaks trailing behind each of the larger
boulders. Today, though, the wind was once again slight, erratic

"ftm me *i»i

pieces. What’s missing?”

I looked over the junk pile. Skin, electronics, window fragments,
plastic shards. “What?”

“Don’t you see it? Aluminum, titanium, carbon-composite, plastic —
anything missing here?”

Now that she had given the hint, I could see it, too. “Steel. Nothing
out of steel, or iron. Is that surprising? Steel’s heavy.” Hardly anything
in a space-going technology is made out of steel. In space, every extra
gram is paid for over and over again in fuel.

“There’s not a lot of steel on a hab module,” Leah said, “but there
is some. Look around our hab, not everything is made of the light

light gusts of no fixed direction.

We reached the top, and Tally smiled. She threaded a lanyard
through the bolthole on her aluminum sheet, dropped it on the
ground, and put one foot on it. “You might try tlus sitting down first,”
she said. Holding the lanyard in one hand like a set of reins, she
pushed off down the lull.

At first she didn’t move very fast. As the sled gathered speed,
each bump sent it increasingly higher. Her balance seemed pre-
carious, but in the one-third normal gravity of Mars, she had plenty
of time. As she leaned to control the sled, her movements were a
slow-motion ballet. We could hear her shout, muffled by her

rebreather, trailing behind her.

“Yahoo!”

I looked at Leah. She looked back at me, then shrugged. She
dropped her sled on the ground and pushed it with her toe, testing
how well it slid over the scum. Then she sat down on it, grasped the
lanyard with both hands and pulled it taut, and looked back over her
shoulder. “Give me a push,” she said.

It took a little more skill than Tally had let on, but after a few spills,
we got the hang of it, and organized scumsledding races. Tally on one
sled and Leah and me together on another, then Leah and Tally
together, then finally all three of us on one sled, Leah and I sitting
docked together and Tally standing with her knees gripping my chest
from behind.

At a rest break, sitting exhausted from climbing, I said to Tally, “So
this means that you think there’s no danger? I mean, nobody trying
to kill us?”

“Never said that.” Tally shook her head. “No, I’m not about to be
calling all-clear, not quite yet. But I’m pretty sure that there’s no dan-
ger right exactly this instant. Not unless these killers are invisible
and don’t leave footprints.” She paused. “And, ’sides,” she continued,
“this is pretty much the tallest ridge in the area. If they were coming
for us, we’d see ’em miles away.”

“But what if we did? What could we do? We’d be sitting ducks.”
Tally grinned a broad grin. “Sitting ducks, you say? Take a peep at
that ridge over there.” She pointed.

I looked. Nothing special, no different than any other ridge. “So?”
I had glanced away for only an instant, but suddenly Tally had an
omniblaster in her right hand, a knife in her left, and a projectile rifle
with an infrared targeting scope resting at her feet. I had no idea how
she could have concealed such armament on her.

“How bout you?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re naked?”

I was far from naked — the temperature couldn’t have been more
than a few degrees above freezing — but I wasn’t carrying a weapon.

“Didn’t I tell you to always wear a gun?" she said. “Dangerous out
here. Who knows who might want to shoot you?”

“Carry an omniblaster? No, I don’t think you ever told us that.”

“Yes I did. Told you both. Back in OLA.” She paused for a second.
“Shit. I bet Leah’s walking around naked, too.” She shook her head.
“You two just a bunch of children. I’m surprised you’ve lived this long,
I really am.”

“Say, look,” said Leah, coming up behind us. “The sun’s out.”

We both looked up. The sky had been steadily overcast ever since
we had landed, but the clouds were breaking up, and between them
we had a glimpse of the sun.

‘Take a look at that sky!” Tally said. “Isn’t that gaudy!” Behind
the clouds, the Martian sky was a startling blue, a bright, nearly
turquoise shade that I’d never seen on Earth. I couldn’t think of a

reason offhand why the sky should be a different color, but, natu-
rally, Leah could.

“Methane,” she said, after a second of thought. “After carbon diox-
ide, methane is the main atmospheric component here. Strongly
absorbs red light, so the sky color is a deeper blue than just the
Rayleigh scattering would predict.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Explains why the colors here are so muted,” Leah said.

With the sunlight, the wind had picked up as well, a steadily rising
wind out of the north. Suddenly the coveralls we had on weren’t
enough to keep us warm. We ran for the habitat

HE OVERCAST HAD CLEARED COMPLETELY THE
next day. The sky was pretematurally blue, and
tire wind had become a steady near-gale from
the north. Leah and I worked inside. Tally still
did her reconnaissance patrol outside, but I
think that even she must have spent much of
her time huddled in tire wind screen of one or
another of the boulders. Now we knew what
had scattered tire pieces of the habitat.

The missing iron, as it turned out, wasn’t a
mystery at all. Once Leah realized what to look for, she found it eas-
ily enough, in the form of grit scattered in with the rest of the habi-
tat pieces.

“It’s a sulfur rich planet,” she said. “I should have thought of it. In
the year and a half of exposure, everything iron or steel got converted
to iron sulfide. It looked just like part of the regolith, so I overlooked
it the first time.”

“In just a year?” I asked. “Isn’t that kinda fast?”

Leah shrugged. “Seems fast to me, too, but don’t forget the UV. The
surface here is more reactive than we’re used to.”

I worked on deciphering their electronic records. They hadn’t kept
personal logs, or perhaps if they had, they were on some optical I
hadn’t found yet. The opticals I had were mostly data, with occa-
sional notes about where or how the samples were collected. By
afternoon I had enough to determine when the last data had been
recorded, and could at least put a date to the disaster.

“Sometime on August tenth,” I told Leah. “Two years ago.”
“Really,” Leah said. “That’s interesting.”

“Interesting?” I said. “Not really. But you asked me for a date.”
“No, but it is interesting," Leah said. Today is June 23rd.”

“So?"

“That’s Earth reckoning, of course. The Mai's year is 687 Earth days
long — one year, ten months and a few weeks. So, in Mars reckon-
ing, it’s nearly the first anniversary of the disaster. Five days from
now, in fact.”

“Spooky," I said.

“No, I wouldn’t call it spooky,” she said. “But it is an odd coinci-
dence.”

I marked it on the calender.

I liked working alone with Leah, with Tally outside on patrol. I
didn’t exactly resent Tally, but I did sometimes envy her effortless
camaraderie with Leah. I welcomed the chance to be alone with her,
even though, for the most part, we worked in silence.

“Tinkerman,” Leah said.

“Yes?"

“Once you start getting the data you’ve recovered indexed, do a
search on weather for me.”

I shrugged. “No problem.” I looked at her. “You think it’s relevant
to the investigation?”

She shook her head. “Just curious."

They had, I discovered, not taken detailed observations of the Mar-
tian weather. But occasionally there was a mention of conditions out-
side. Their own experience mirrored ours. About the same time in the
Martian year, the overcast had cleared, and a steady wind had arisen
out of the north. The day before the disaster, data had been marked
with a note that samples from two sites had been missed; the wind
had blown away the stakes marking the site locations.

On another optical I found satellite photos of
Mai's. I looked at these with interest. The
weather dealing we’d seen wasn’t local to the
Syrtisian saddle; the photos showed the north-
ern hemisphere completely obscured by cloud
cover, and then a sudden dealing across the
entire hemisphere. The view must have been
an infrared falsecolor, since the ocean was
white and the land areas, in contrast, looked
nearly black. I checked the dates on the photos,
and converted them in my head into Martian
season. The dealing started at just about the
end of northern hemisphere spring.

Leah nodded when I showed her what I’d
recovered. She’d already radioed up to ask
Langevin for orbital photographs, and he’d con-
firmed that the clearing of the clouds we’d seen
was ubiquitous, starting with breaks in the
cloud cover at northern mid-latitudes, then
slowly spreading south. “Apparently it’s a sea-
sonal tiling.”

Langevin had also mentioned that the rover
had arrived, after a long slow transit from the Moon. Did we still want
it? Where should he set it down?

Oh, yes, we still wanted it.

U rn

f I is

1 1ME FOR A VACATION!” TALLY
I said, when the unpiloted utility
I lander had dropped the rover
* off and I had checked out the
systems and declared it fully
• functional. The rover was the

same awful shade of yellow-
green as the lander had been, a
color chosen for maximum
contrast against the browns
and purples of Mars. It had six webbed wheels mounted on a rocker-
bogey suspension that would give it incredible hill-climbing ability;
I had little doubt that it would have been able to crawl right over
the hab-lab, if an incautious pilot had tested poorly on navigation.
1 said as much to the team after the brief test drive.

“Are you seriously suggesting that the habitat was crushed by a
rover?” Leah said. “No tread marks were found on any of the pieces
we found.”

“A rover would have left tracks,” Tally said. “Even after two years,
we’d have see them.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I was just giving an example of how
robust the suspension is.”

“I see."

“So,” Tally said. “Time for a trip.”

“A trip,” Leah said. “Why not? Where did you want to go?”

“Why not go the beach?” Tally said. "Head north. See what a Mars
ocean is like."

“Mrnrn,” Leah said. “Not today. I’ll still be busy tomorrow, too, I
think. Maybe the next day.”

“Copacetic,” said Tally. “I wouldn’t mind a day to do some long-
range recon with the rover, anyway. That is, if Tink says it’s checked
out okay?"

“All systems in perfect shape,” I said. “No reason for you not to
drive around a bit."

A lot of the work Leah asked me to do seemed to have nothing to
do with the investigation of the accident. She was conducting her
own investigation, I decided, a scientific investigation of the progress
of terraforming — no, ecopoiesis — on Mars. She had me decipher
all the data I could out of the opticals; data on bacteria counts and
atmosphere, and checked it against the measurements she could
make herself. “Cripes, I wish I were a biologist,” had become her
favorite phrase, muttered as she stared into the screen of a micro-
scope, counting bacteria, but she was clearly happy doing the work,
54

and I was happy to assist, to do anytlung th u;
made Leah happy.

More methane in the atmosphere, she sai l,
at a break. Some ethane, ethylene, even acety-
lene. And quite a bit more oxygen than
expected.

“Oxygen and methane? Isn’t that explosive?”
“No, oxy is still way under one percent; a’ I
in all, it’s still mostly a reducing atmosphere
The hydrocarbons are all greenhouse gases.”
“Gaia,” I said, suddenly realizing whai she
was gett ing at.

“Gaia,” she agreed, a soft smile creeping
slowly across her face. The bacteria were pro-
ducing greenhouse gases, warming die planet
up. Making it a better abode for life.

I WAS GETTING BORED WITH THE CLAUSTRO-
phobic spaces of the habitat, and the same-
ness of the landscape, and I was sure that Leah
and Tally were as well. We were all looking for-
ward to the jaunt north to the shores of the
Boreal ocean. So I was rather surprised when, at breakfast on the
morning designat ed, Tally shook her head, and said, “It’ll be just you
two loverbirds. I’m not coming.”

I pretended interest in my food. I never could guess how Leah
would react. For me, the idea of a trip in the pressurized rover, a thou-
sand kilometers alone with Leah, was as close to heaven as I was
likely to ever find.

“Why?” Leah said.

Tally smiled. “A trap.”

Despite assiduous searching, Tally had found no evidence what-
soever of sabotage. Anybody else would have said, that means it was
an accident. Tally said: that means that they were clever.

We made a great show of our departure, deliberately packing the
rover slowly and openly with all the supplies for three people to take
an extended trip. Then all three of us got in. From outside, through
the bubble canopy, it would be clear that three people were in the
piloting compartment, eagerly watching the terrain.

It would be impossible to tell that one of the three was no more
than a dummy constructed of spare clothing.

Once aboard, I powered up the rover, and it rose up from its squat-
ting position to its full height above the Martian terrain. I checked all
the systems one more time, testing each wheel in turn for forward
and reverse power, making skid marks through the brown grit and
tossing muck across the landscape. The bacteria would not care; they
would thrive in one spot quite as well as another.

If somebody had bombed the first habitat, and was clever enough
and subtle enough to betray no sign of themselves, they must be
flushed out of hiding. They might be complacent enough to try the
same trick again, if they were thoroughly convinced that nobody was
watching. Tally wanted to give them that chance. Tally wanted to
watch them set the bomb.

Systems all functional. I had a wild urge to wave goodbye to Tally,
but that would never do. We set off with no ceremony.

F or hundreds of kilometers we looked at
brown rocks, covered with a thin veneer of
slime.

The wind got stronger as we drove north
toward the ocean. The landscape was monot-
onous; rocks and rilles and tiny rivers, broken
by lakes, each lake in the form of a perfect cir-
cle, reflecting the too-blue sky. To our left, the
ground sloped gently up toward the ancient
volcano whose flanks we were skirting. The
actual summit of the volcano was invisible over the horizon. When
we crossed the peak of the Syitis saddle the wind was coming straight
at us at well over a hundred kilometers an hour. It was enough to

slow the rover’s progress considerably, and at places I almost wor-
ried that the wind would pick us up and blow us backwards, but the
rover’s six huge wheels held traction superbly, and kept us moving.

Once across the pass, the wind dropped a bit, but never let up
entirely. It was constant, unwavering from the north.

The rover drove itself, if we let it, with infrared laser-stripers
searching out obstacles in front of it and a mapping program in its
computer brain that continually compared the view against the
inertial navigation and the stored satellite maps, to compute an
optimal traverse across the rippled terrain. For most of the first
day, Leah and I took turns driving, following the computer’s sug-
gested path sometimes, diverting to a different route that looked
smoother or more interesting when the whim struck. By the after-
noon, the novelty of the drive had slackened, and we let the rover
pick its own path.

Langevin had left Mai's orbit days earlier, but he had left behind
him a little areosynchronous communications relay, so we could have
stayed in touch with Tally at the habitat if we had desired to. We kept
radio silence, though, by agreement: Tally had said that we should
assume that any radio communications we made would be heard by
the enemy. The relay had enough power to let us send reports directly
to Spacewatch. We transmitted our daily report back, essentially just
a “yes, we’re alive” verification, and in the report we included a
recorded snippet of Tally’s voice, to maintain Tally’s deception to her
hypothesized snooping ears.

In the middle of the afternoon, the rover crested a rise and angled
off to the west, finding a smoother traverse down the slope to avoid
a field of boulders the size of skyscrapers. Leah was in the aft cabin,
analyzing data she had brought with her, and I was alone in the cock-
pit. At first I didn’t know what I was seeing, looking north. The hori-
zon was white.

This was the highest ridge between us and the ocean, so, looking
north, I ought to be able to see the ocean. Was the ocean covered
with ice? I overrode the autopilot and parked the rover for a
moment, rummaging for binoculars to get a better
view. Leah came up from the cabin.

“The ocean’s white,” I said.

“Odd." Leah looked at it, pondering. “Not ice; it’s
nearly northern summer, and the ice melted months
ago. Whitecaps, from die wind, maybe. We’ll see soon
enough, if we keep driving.”

I took that as advice, and brought the autopilot back
on line. The rover started to roll. Leah reached out an
arm to steady herself against a handbar, and kept on
standing, looking out the bubble at die horizon.

We didn’t reach the Boreal Ocean that evening. Tire
autonavigation on tire rover was perfectly capable of continuing its
traverse after dark, but we were no more tiran thirty kilometers from
the ocean, and we elected to shut down for the night, so that our
arrival at the ocean would be in daylight.

After nine hours of motion, the cabin still seemed to rock with the
motion of an imaginary traverse, although I had squatted the rover in
the lee of a hundred-meter escarpment.

The workstations of the aft cabin folded away into panels on the
walls, and two narrow cots folded out from the bulkhead, trans-
forming the cabin into a small but cozy bedroom. I looked at the cots,
and at Leah. The cots were narrow, but looked like they might be
wide enough for two, if the two slept close. Leah gave me no hints. I
folded tire second cot back into its niche, and convinced myself that,
I saw just tiie faintest trace of a smile on Leah’s face. In any case, she
slid over silently, and I nestled myself in next to her.

We reached the ocean a bit before noon of the next day. The final
few kilometers was a steep traverse down the bluffs, not quite steep
enough to be called cliffs, but steep enough that the rover picked its
way slowly, sidling nearly crabwise down the last few hundred
meters. There wasn’t much of a beach; just rocks. From above, the
ocean was white. It moved with something more than just the rhyth-
mic swell of waves. It writhed, and humped, looking almost alive. As
we got closer, a fine spray peppered the bubble in erratic spurts. The

spray dried to milky white flakes, smearing but not totally obscur-
ing the view.

“Salt?" I said.

Leah shook her head. “Magnesium sulfate, mostly,” she said. She
spoke louder than normal to be heard over the whistling of the wind
and a sudden patter of spray. “The ocean’s got tons of it. It’s another
reason the ocean doesn’t freeze solid in the winter; lowers the freez-
ing point a few degrees."

I squatted the rover down behind a boulder, where it would be out
of the worst of the spray, and we suited up with rebreathers and sun-
block to go outside.

Outside, the constant wind was warm and damp. Between the wind
and tiie spray, I think that it was the most miserable place on Mars.
Leah, though, laughed and ran like a little girl, arching her back and
spreading her arms, daring Mai's to do its woist.

I took off one glove, raised my hand and caught a bit of spray on
my fingers, then pulled up my rebreather mask slightly to put it to my
tongue. It was slightly bitter. Leah looked back at me over her shoul-
der, and laughed. “Don’t eat too much of it,” she shouted.

“Why?” I shouted back. “It’s not poisonous.”

“You might regret it," she shouted back. “You know what they used
magnesium sulfate for in the old days?”

“What?”

“Laxative for' infants! You’re standing right next to the universe’s
largest dose of baby laxative!”

With that she turned back, and started to pick her way past the
rocks toward the ocean. I scrambled to catch up with her. I could
hear the ocean now, but it wasn’t the rolling of waves that I heard. It
was a stranger sound, hissing and popping and splatting.

In a few moments we reached a final set of rocks, right at the edge
of tiie ocean, and at last we could observe what we had been unable
to see from further away.

The ocean was boiling.

From tiie pools at our feet to the farthest horizon, the entire ocean
was aboil, bubbles rising up and breaking, spattering
spray everywhere. Enormous bubbles rose bmping
out of the depths with a thunderous roar followed by
a tremendous splatter; smaller bubbles rose with
blurps and pops from everywhere; infinitesimally
tiny bubbles fizzed and hissed in rocky pools.

An huge bubble burst in front of us, not five meters
distant, and I instinctively flinched, anticipating being
hit with scalding spray. Leah laughed with delight.
She pulled her glove off and, when the slosh came
toward her, bent over and dipped her bare hand into
the boiling water. Before I could scream at her, she
cupped a handful of water and, with a grin so large I could see it even
behind her rebreather, she dashed it in my face and giggled.

The water was lukewarm.

WE GOT BACK IN THE ROVER,
coveralls were so stiff with
d spray that it was difficult to
them off. Our faces and hands
2 red from tiie wind, and itchy
i dried ocean. Leah was still in
puckish good mood, and as we
,ed down to undergarments,
was laughing.

‘You know what?” she said,
pulling off her rebreather, and she didn’t bother to wait for an answer.
“You know the great thing about it? Makes it worth the whole trip?”
“What’s that?”

“You don’t stink!”

I opened my mouth to say something, and suddenly realized she
was right. The stench of Mars that we had gotten so used to every
time we came in from tiie outside, was missing.

“What a great planet,” she said.

We both stripped, and gave one another sponge baths. The water

recycler would have the devil of a time pulling sulfate out of the
water, but that was what machinery was for. I took a lot longer clean-
ing her off than I had any right to, and with one thing leading to
another, it was nearly dark before either of us dressed.

I knew she was waiting for me to ask. At last I did. “Leah? The
water was warm, but it wasn’t hot. Why was it boiling?”

“That’s an easy one. It wasn’t”

“But — "

“Carbon dioxide,” she said. “I should have known, but it wasn’t
obvious until I saw it. Mars has mostly carbon dioxide in the atmos-
phere, so it should have been obvious that the oceans would be sat-
urated with dissolved CO-two. It wasn’t boiling — it was fizzing .”
That made sense, all but one thing. “But, wouldn’t it be in equilib-
rium? Why should it be fizzing?”

ide was under pressure. The water warmed a little, but the supersat -
urated carbon dioxide stayed in solution.

But it was an unstable situation, and ever more precarious as the
season moved toward summer. Eventually, something must trigger
the inevitable. Somewhere, a little of the carbon dioxide came out of
solution, at pressure, and formed bubbles. The bubbles stirred the
water, expanding as they rose, and the stirring let more carbon diox-
ide out of solution. The warm surface waters turned over, and super-
saturated cold waters from the depths warmed up. Like a chain reac-
tion, the release of supersaturated carbon dioxide was almost
explosive, and it took only days for the reaction to spread across the
entire width of the Boreal ocean. A whole winter’s worth of atmos-
phere was coming out of the ocean, and coming out with vigor.

The wind. We had felt the wind from the ocean, a clue blowing

“Summer. The ocean is warming up in the summer sun. Carbon
dioxide has a solubility in water that strongly decreases when it gets
warmer. So, as summer comes to the northern hemisphere, the
Boreal ocean releases carbon dioxide."

“Oh."

And it wasn’t until the middle of the night that she suddenly stiff-
ened and sat bolt upright. “Oh,” she said, in a tiny voice. I opened my
eyes and watched her sleepily. “The wind,” she said. “The wind.”

She got up, and in a moment there was a glow as her computer
came alight. She was beautiful, limned in pale fire by the glow cast
by the screen backlighting.

“What is it?” I said.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“It must be something."

“Just — I had a thought, that’s all.”

“What?”

“I wonder.” She bit her lip. “Just how much carbon dioxide, exactly,
do you think is dissolved in the Boreal Ocean?”

By the time the sky started to brighten with dawn, Leah was dis-
tinctly bedraggled, but she had it mostly worked out. The answer
was, a lot. A hell of a lot

Over the long Martian winter, the temperature of the northern ocean
dropped to near freezing, and the ocean had served as a sponge for
carbon dioxide. A peculiar convection served to stir the ocean as it
cooled: as the surface layers cooled and became saturated with carbon
dioxide, they got denser, and sank, turning over the ocean until the
entire ocean was uniformly cold and saturated with carbon dioxide.

When the spring began, the surface layers of the ocean warmed
up, and the dissolved carbon dioxide began to come out of solution.
But the warmer water, free of its heavy carbon dioxide, stayed on
the surface; the cold, saturated water stayed below. With only two
tiny moons, there was little in the way of tides to stir the deeps. The
water got warmer, but in the deep water, the dissolved carbon diox-

right in our faces, and we'd ignored it.

“They weren’t murdered, Tinkerman," Leah said. “They were —
my god, Tally’s still back there, in the habitat. She doesn’t know —
The radio. We can get her on the radio, warn her.”

“Doesn’t know what?”

“I’ll explain everything when I talk to her. Quick, what day is it?”
She grabbed my calender and looked at it. In neat letters, on the bot-
tom comer of the square marked June 28, 1 had completely forgot-
ten that I’d written a note: One Martian year. RIP.

But Tally didn’t answer the radio, not the regular channels, not the
emergency channel.

“Damn,” I said. “It’s Tally and her blasted radio silence. She won’t
answer.”

Leah shook her head violently. “I know Tally better than that. She
would listen to the emergency channel no matter what, and she’d
answer when she heard us break silence. Tinkerman, I think the wind
must have tom away the radio aerial. The hab was designed for space,
not for Mars, and the antenna wasn’t that strongly mounted. Proba-
bly blew over the high-gain antenna as well. ”

“So?”

“So how fast do you think this tiling can go?”

It took longer to get moving than I had expected. The autonaviga-
tor wouldn’t come on line. Over the night the spray had fogged over
the lenses of the laser stripers, and the autopilot wouldn’t budge with-
out its obstacle-recognition system working. :\s I took the rover up
the bluff on manual control, climbing only cent imeters at a time over
the rough spots, Leah fidgeted with clear agitation, but she stayed
silent, knowing that distracting me from piloting would only slow us
down. As soon as we had climbed a few hundred meters above the
ocean, I put on a rebreather and, using half our supply of clean water,
I carefully washed the laser striper and the bubble.

The steel pails of the rover looked matte, almost corroded. When
we got back, I would have to take the rover down for inspection and

overhaul. In fact, I would have preferred to do a thorough inspection
right then, but I knew Leah wouldn’t let me stop for that . The rover’s
autodiagnostic checked out green, so I put the autopilot back on line
and punched for speed.

There was nothing more we could do. There was no way that I
could out-pilot the autonavigation system over a course it had run
before; it had all the bad terrain memorized in detail and had learned
exactly which parts to detour around and which were smooth run-
ning. The ride was bumpy, but that was only to be expected. I turned
to Leah, and waved a hand.

“I’m ready to listen," I said.

“IT WAS ALL THERE IN FRONT OF US,” LEAH SAID. “ALL THE CLUES, IF
only we’d really seen them. The pieces of the habitat, that should

have tipped us off right there. The habitat modules, they weren’t orig-
inally designed for Mars. We knew that. Nobody ever goes to Mars,
so how could there be hab modules designed for it? It’s a lunar habi-
tat design.

“The air pressure on Mai's is five hundred millibars, just about half
that of Earth. So we set the pressure in the hab to five hundred mil-
libars, and forgot about it. With a nearly fifty-fifty mixture of oxygen
and nitrogen in the air mixture, the oxygen in the habitat was just
what it is at standard conditions, and after a week I bet you didn’t
even remember that it wasn’t Earth standard.

“But there’s one critical difference. Lunar habitat modules are
designed to withstand pressure from the inside. They’re plenty
strong, against internal pressure. But what about external pressure?”
“It imploded.”

“Right. The air pressure on Mars is not a constant! All that gas dis-
solved in the northern sea — when it comes out of solution, the air
pressure rises. It rises a lot.. The wind, that constant wind from the
north — that was our second clue. The habitat was set to maintain a
constant pressure of five hundred millibars inside. Nobody ever
designed it with the idea that the outside pressure might increase.
Somewhere there was a weak joint, maybe a seam that wasn’t rein-
forced against an unexpected pressure from outside. It blew.”

“But there was an explosion. We saw the marks.”

Leah shook her head. “You saw the piece, the one with the tiny
scrape of blue paint on it. What does blue paint mean to you?”

I only had to think for an instant. “Blue. Oxygen.”

“Right. The implosion must have punctured an oxygen tank in
the habitat. Pure oxygen, under pressure, spurting out into the Mai's
atmosphere .... the Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide,
but a good component is methane, and it’s got noticeable amounts
of other hydrocarbons as well. In a pure oxygen leak, of course it
will bum.”

“It must have happened at night,” I said. “They never knew what

hit them. The one man was killed instantly. The other was tossed
out of the hole in the side of the habitat, without a rebreather, to die
of suffocation.”

Leah nodded. “And now the same thing is happening. The atmos-
pheric pressure is rising. Tally’s there in the habitat, alone ... and
she’s waiting for the wrong enemy.”

W E WERE OVER THE PEAK OF THE SYRTIS SADDLE AND A
good way into the long, slow downhill toward the
Hellas basin, only a hundred kilometers from the hab,
when the wheel fell off. Leah was on the radio, in the
unlikely hope that perhaps the synchronous relay
was the problem, and now that we were approaching line of sight
conditions, direct communication might raise Tally. The wheel came
off with a resounding snap, and the rover lurched.

The autopilot diagnosed the problem, instantly rebalanced the sus-
pension to keep the weight away from of the missing wheel, and
smoothly braked us to a stop, blaring alarms.

The alarms were a little late.

We both went outside to look. It was the right rear wheel that had
failed; we found it a few dozen meters further on, where it had rolled
up against a rock. The wheel itself was a titanium-alloy mesh, light
enough to cany in one hand, for all that it was nearly two meters in
diameter. The wheel bearing was steel. Or, it had originally been steel,
when it had been there at all. There was little left of it
“Well,” Leah said.

“Well,” I said. There was no way to replace a wheel; they weren’t
supposed to come off. “I think maybe we can rebalance the rover.
Shift the loading to the front left side. Five wheels ought to be
enough. We might have to go a bit slower."

Leah nodded. “It’s a plan.”

We piled rocks onto the rover, and strapped them down with
bungees, to move the center of gravity forward off the missing wheel.
Then we piled more rocks inside the rover, in the front left pilot’s
seat I didn’t mention that we would never get the Mai's stink out of
the rover; it was too late to worry about that, and we barely noticed
it by then anyway. The autopilot refused to budge so much as a meter
without an overhaul, so I piloted it on manual. This was good for less
than a third the speed of the autopilot, but still, even that pace cov-
ered ground. Leah went back into the aft cabin to examine the sam-
ples she had scraped off of the wheel.

It was only a hundred kilometers. We finished more than fifty of
them before the second wheel fell off.

We were going more slowly this time. There was no lurch, and no
noise. The rover just slowly careened to the right, and kept on rolling
until it slid to a stop on its side.

Leah came out of the hatch after I did. She didn’t bother looking at
the axle, or at the rover. No need; it was obviously not going any-
where, even if we had a crane to put it back right-side up. The rocks
we had piled onto the rover had cracked the bubble when it rolled.
“Sulfur-reducing bacteria,” she said.

“Say again?”

“Sulfur-reducing bacteria,” she said. “Convert iron to iron sulfide.
There’s energy in free iron; in the presence of free sulfur, enough
energy for a bacterium to exploit. The lack of iron at the site; I
should have figured that ordinary weathering wasn’t enough to
account for it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Not that it matters now,” Leah said. “We don’t have time to waste.
We’ve got to get to Tally and warn her.” With a matter of fact attitude,
she hopped up onto a rock and stared across the horizon. “So how
far do we have to walk?”

I tried the radio one more time. Come on, Tally. What was she
doing, I wondered. Did she even know that the antenna was down,
or did she just think we were scrupulous in keeping radio silence?
Was she standing at the door of the habitat with a gun? Hiding behind
the rocks, waiting for enemies that would never come? If only she
would answer, it would only take an instant to tell her about the dan-
gerously low habitat pressure.

Fix the antenna, Tally, I thought, just fix it, and listen to the radio.
But she wouldn’t. Fixing the antenna would be too obviously a sign
that the habitat was still occupied. I threw down the radio.

The inside of the rover was a mess, but we managed to scrounge
two spare sets of replacement packs for the rebreathers. I down-
loaded the bearing to the hab out of the rover’s computer, and set the
inertial compass. Once we got close, we would be able to use the
habitat’s come-hither beacon to home in. I grabbed a set of portable
radio transceivers and checked that they were working. I couldn’t
think of anything more to carry. Before we left, Leah snipped two
pieces of titanium sheeting away from internal partitions of the rover,
and snapped them free.

“Ready,” she said.

We ran.

The Mars gravity makes it easy to run, and the unwavering wind
was, for a change, on our side. Still, after an hour of running I was
winded, and the second hour was more trudging than running. Our
cold-suits trapped sweat all too well, and it ran down my back and
down my legs, like ants with clammy feet.

Mars narrowed in on us. Ridges, followed by valleys; valleys fol-
lowed by ridges. Another hour.

“Bear further to the right here,” Leah said.

“That’s not the most direct route."

“I know.”

We were walking pretty slowly by now. Her route followed the con-
tom-, instead of cutting downhill, and was a bit easier, even if it was
less direct. I was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t make it to tire
habitat by nightfall. It would be impossible to continue after darkness
fell — Mars’s moons shed almost no useful light — and by the morn-
ing, we couldn’t even be certain that the habitat would still be there.

In another horn we had reached tire edge of a long downhill. There,
tiny in the distance was a glint of metal: our goal, the habitat.

It was impossible to tell from the gleam whether it was still in one
piece.

Without a word, Leah handed me one of the two sheets of titanium.
I looked at tire downhill. It was a long, smooth grade, with tire usual
cover of Martian slime. I grinned, and Leah grinned back at nre, her
face in the rebreather mask like some painted mechanical demon,
and then we both stood on our sleds, grasped the lanyards, and, at
tire same moment, pushed off.

We would arrive in style.

between my shoulder blades.

Y SLED SKIDDED TO A STOP IN A SPRAY OF
slime a hundred meters or so from tire
habitat, and Leah stopped close
behind me.

The habitat was apparently empty.
But at least it was still apparently in a
single piece. I ran toward it, shouting
for Tally. I reached the airlock, and
was just reaching out for the handle
when I felt the gun pushed gently

“Moving real slowly, friend, keep your hands in sight, and turn
around. Slowly.”

Tally was painted the same color as the Martian slime, bits of sand
and rock sticking to her randomly. The projectile rifle was in her left
hand, aimed steadily at nry middle. I could see tire crinkling at the
edges of her eyes as she smiled behind the rebreather. “Tinkenrran.
Welcome home.”

She lowered the gun, and turned to greet Leah. “Didn’t expect you
to come back on foot. What brings y’all back so sudden?”

“Tire air pressure,” Leah said. “It’s going to — ”

“Yeah,” Tally said. “I noticed sometiring going on with tire air. Could
feel it in nry bones, like a thunderstorm. Fact, I had to dial up tire
pressure in tire hab three times in four days.”

Leah stopped, thunderstruck. “You increased the hab pressure?”
“Why, sure,” Tally said.

We just looked at each other.

“What?” Tally asked. “Sometiring wrong with that? I figured that if
the hab pressure wasn’t increased, there could be trouble.”

Leah shook her head. “No, nothing wrong. Nothing at all."

I T WAS OUR LAST NIGHT ON MARS. WE HAD FILED A PRELD I
inaiy report with Spacewatch, and in the morning
Langevin would bring tire lander down to take us home .
I was looking out the tiny window of the hab at the Mat -
tian landscape. In tire evening twilight tire browns hai '
turned to purple. Tiny puddles of water caught the sky
light and reflected it back at us. Even tire slinre lookec
fragile and ethereal. “It is beautiful," I said “in its wav.”
“Ask me, it still stinks,” Tally said.

“It’s dying,” Leah said.

“Dying?” I turned away from the window.

Leah nodded slowly. “I’ve been finishing up the work from the data
they had stored to optical before the accident. They got enough data
to fully model the ecology. It’s dying.”

“How?” I asked. “Why?”

“Oxygen,” she said. “The oxygen level in the atmosphere is rising,
slowly but inexorably. The photosynthetic forms simply out-compete
the anaerobes, and tire result is that oxygen is gradually accumulat-
ing in tire atmosphere.”

“But that’s good," I said. “That’s what happened on Earth. The bio-
sphere is evolving.”

Leah shook her head. “But Mars isn’t Earth. Tire oxygen is starting
to scavenge hydrocarbons out of the atmosphere, and after that it
will begin to displace carbon dioxide. Just like on Earth, but for Mars,
that will be catastrophic. A few tens of millibars less carbon dioxide,
and — ’’ She clapped her hands. “Frozen solid. End of story.”

“But the Gaia hypothesis — doesn’t the presence of life regulate die
temperature?”

She shook her head. “Bacteria are dumb. Gaia is a hypothesis; it s
never been a proven theory, hr this case, it happens to be a wrong tin -
ory.”

“You’re sure?”

Leah nodded. We were silent for a moment, and then I asked, “How
long?”

“Hmnrm? Well, couldn’t say precisely. Not enough data.”

“Give or take.”

“I’d give it few thousand years at the outside. Probably less than a
thousand.” She saw me smiling, and added, shaking her head, “The
time may be uncertain, but the fact still is, it will happen."

That put a little different spin on it. We would all be dead before
tire planet returned to bare rock. No need to nroum for Mars, not for
quite a while yet

L ater, alone with .just Leah in the tiny sleep-
ing cubbyhole, I made love to her slowly and
deliberately She closed her eyes and arched her
back as I stroked her, in her own way sensuous
as a cat, but still I couldn’t tell what sort of feel-
ing she had for me.

When it was over, and we were lying in the
dark, I had to ask. “Do you feel anything for me?
Anything at all?”

Leah turned over. “Quit asking meaningless
questions. I unask your question. Mu.”

Much later, after I thought she had fallen asleep, she said softly, “It
looks like I’m stuck with you. I suppose there are worse people I
could get stuck with. Don’t get in the way.”

It was all I could ask for. I will follow her as long as she will allow
it, love her, ask nothing in return. Maybe someday I will mean some-
thing to her, maybe some day as much as a comfortable pair of slip-
pers or a favorite chair.

hi the meantime, though — it was a large universe. There would
be places to go, no end of places to follow her to. That was enough.

hi the morning, the lander would come, and I would follow her
home. □

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The explorer from Earth came in search of new wonders, never expecting
to find the true meaning of love as well.

your E|J BS, m y

darl l n . 9 ; black and

White and Mug

BY KAREN HABER
Illustration by Bob Eggleton

F irst came the beads. Silver, strung sliding between
COLD gems in a dark bowl. Tali dreamed of them, of
beads and other things: frozen fire and pale flashes in
the purple sky, brightness that roared and blinded, and
a strange being wavering through pale mists and pulsing
lights, singing a long song in an alien tongue.

She curled against the warm stone of her
cave and rocked in her sleep to alien music.
Awakening early, she floated for a moment on
the edge of meaning.

A stranger? There were no strangers here,
only her people. She arose, made the ritual
greeting to her nestmates, and contracted her
limbs in preparation for the day’s harvesting.

Outside the nest, the green light of the twin
suns was strong in the orchard, casting long
red shadows on the erfani grass. Tali’s mind
was easy and quiet as she gathered black fruit
and spotted berries for the evening meal.

With the life-giving light warm upon her,
she was tempted to dismiss the odd dreams

as mere night thoughts and notions, dissi-
pating like mist at daybreak. But the ghosts
of dreams Angered, whispering to her, and
Tali could not keep herself from listening,
from wondering.

— Tali!

It was her cousin Dolmin, very solid, very
real in the hot sunlight Dolmin, her mate-to-be.

— Why aren’t you helping my mother and
sisters prepare the Festival cave? His crest,
more gray than green, revealed liis immatu-
rity. It sat barely upright midway up his long
lavender beak. — You know that we’re nearly
ready for the feast.

He and Tali were as yet unconsummated

but his manner was that of one longtime mate to another. Rather than
reply directly, Tali exuded a scent that she knew he disliked, and
moved away toward a stand of mottled berries.

Dolmin’s crest rose a bit higher. — Once we’re mated I won’t tol-
erate this kind of behavior.

— We’re not mated yet, she replied sharply. — Not until the Festi-
val after this one.

Tali kept her back to him until he had moved off, returning to his
precious Festival preparations, and she was wonderfully alone
among the trees. Tali wouldn’t love him, ever. Couldn’t.

The betrothal had been her clan’s doing. She knew that she would
soon be taken up by brood concerns and her own precious nestlings.
Once she had mated with Dolmin he would not matter very much
more to her than he did now.

Clusters of succulent orange-brown
berries hung within reach. She unfurled one
of her sinuous yellow aims and absorbed the
treat with pleasure.

A sudden sawing together of twigs and a
whisper of grass crushed underfoot brought
her out of her reverie. Dolmin again? Tali
checked her excrement sac and saw that she
had plenty to fling at him.

But the longer she listened the less con-
vinced she became that her petulant cousin
was lingering in the shadows, spying. The
rhythm and weight of the steps was unfamil-
iar, odd, wrong. Tali knew every footfall of
every nestmate. No, it was no one she knew.

Some unknown thing was out here, stalking
her. Nightfeeders? Her double heartlung
began to labor and she wheezed with fear.

Had she stayed out too long? No. The
suns were still casting long shadows. It was
still afternoon, too early for the dreaded
hunters to emerge.

She had seen them once, leaning on their
spiky black legs and clicking claws, gathered
by the nest’s mouth, watching, kept at bay
only by the golden flames of the fires. Their
huge amber eyes had glinted hungrily. The
memory made her shiver.

Again, strange footsteps.

Tali knew of no other feeders that hunted
by day, but she hid herself nonetheless. In a
moment she was a dappled twist of tree trunk
wreathed in purple erfani grass.

Safely disguised, Tali cast her mind in a
wide and sweeping arc.

At first she touched nothing but the small
trilling thoughts of the tiny soil-dwellers. On her third pass she was
enmeshed within a kaleidoscope of peculiar colors and sounds, lost,
tumbling, dizzied by things she felt but couldn’t understand. Slowly
the confusion resolved into a landscape, a sky, a meadow. But the
sky was wrong, outlandish, a garish blue that shocked her. Dread-
ful. The ground was a nauseating shade of brown. And what were
those structures? What was that light in that terrible sky? Silver
beads with fire at one end. Wrong, all wrong and frightful in their
wrongness, all jumbled and strange. The lacerating yellow sunlight.
The awful green trees.

She was caught within the matrices of an alien mind. Assaulted by
odd odois, strange sounds, stranger thoughts. She would have fled,
but for one odd and compelling image which held her there for a
moment longer.

She saw a being, tall, with four limbs, two of which seemed to dan-
gle uselessly, and an oversized head — with only two apparent eyes!
— partially covered in pale filaments completely unlike the orange
crests of Tali and her nestmates. And it was the same color all over,
a vague pinkish brown.

There were several organs on part of the head but the use of
each was unclear. The body seemed to be a series of intersecting
curves, quite peculiar. And yet the entire image tingled with the
most positive emotional associations. Tali felt a deep, wistful, all-
pervasive yearning.

The sensation coupled with the image was so powerful that Tali
could not help herself. Without conscious volition she assumed the
guise of the being she had glimpsed within the alien’s brain.

As she did so, the stranger emerged from the trees and came to-
ward her. It was bipedal, tall, with an oversized head, and two use-
less forepaws.

Tali’s heartlung throbbed with excitement and fear.

The alien’s form was similar to the one she had chosen as her dis-
guise, but not quite identical: taller, leaner,
with hardly any intersecting curves at all. The
filaments atop its head were dark and much
shorter than hers.

The stranger stopped moving and stood
near her, very near, quivering like a molting
nestling while emitting odd modulated noises.

For a moment Tali didn’t realize what was
happening.

"Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.
Please. Don’t be frightened. Can you
understand me?’’

The notes, ascending and descending in
strange patterns which she had never heard
before, were oddly familial - . The music came
from an organ on its head that seemed to rip-
ple like the end of a moutharm. But a mouth
on a head? And only one?

Somehow, Tali knew that the sound was
song-speech, and that the stranger was
singing a language — with its only mouth! —
that she had heard in her dreams.

Song-speech, but she knew what it meant.
Perhaps her inadvertent trip through the
thing’s mind had somehow sensitized her to
its language. Was the alien unable to converse
mind-to-mind? She felt pity for it.

7 said, can you understand me?” it sang.
Suddenly terrified, Tali turned and darted
into the shelter of black leaves. As soon as
she was hidden by the foliage she took on the
appearance of leaf-flecked ground.

“ Wait ,” the stranger cried. “ Please , don’t run
away. I’m not going to hurt you. Come back!”
It tried to follow her but went thrashing off
in the wrong direction, out of sight. Not until
its mental emanations had faded from range
did Tali resume her natural form.

Amazing. Wondrous. Strange. Her heartlung pounded. She felt giddy
and lightheaded.

She would have to tell the Elders, of course. Any threat to the nest
must be reported, and all strangers were threats.

What would they say? Would they have her come forward to tell
the entire tribe about it at the Festival? Would they sing a song
just for her?

The suns were blue-green as they set. The Festival flames would
be leaping. Suddenly eager for the feast, Tali hurried back to the nest.

The sacred blazes had been kindled in the ancient cave and the
combat dances enacted by the warriors. Fire raptors swooped from
the soot-blackened ceiling over the heads of Tali’s nestmates, cast-
ing bright plumage down upon the clamoring group. All reached up
moutharms eagerly: to catch a fire feather at festival time was aus-
picious indeed. One floated down, flickering red and silver just
within Tali’s reach, but before she could touch it, it was snatched
out of her grasp.

She was CdllQht

within the matrices

of an dliGIl

mind. fissaulted
by odd Odors,
strange sounds,
stranger

wonders.

Tali’s nestmates — those of age — were already mating in groups.
She watched them, but she found her thoughts wandering. Always
before she had felt impatient, envious and eager for her own mating
time. Tonight the sight barely held her interest.

She passed a circle of immature males and there was Dolmin peer-
ing at her, his eyes glowing like embers escaped from the firestones.
77ie veiy sight of him infuriated her. She pretended not to notice him
and veered away. She wouldn’t share her day’s adventure with
Dolmin. Never, never, never.

For that matter, why should she share it with any of them? The
story belonged to her, to her alone. She would ponder it in luxurious
privacy, later. Tali reinforced her own personal shields and faded
back into the Festival crowd.

After the ritual matings came the group loving and then the gut-
tural chants that signaled the beginning of the Elders’ tales. Always
before, Tali had sat with the others, rapt and waiting for the next
verse. But this night she felt restless and even before the Tale of
the People was half over she had pulled herself to the edge of the
circle, too distracted to listen. It was an old story and she knew it
too well: We were few and tiny. We toiled across the terrible desert,
forced to eat one another for survival. Yes, yes, yes. She could
recite it asleep.

Today, in the orchard, she had seen something new, something that
made her heartlung pound with excitement. And tomorrow? She
crept away from the heat and light to think about that.

She slept little. Only one sun had cleared the shoulder of the
land when she arose and went forth. The night’s creatures had
retired but the day was barely begun and nothing stirred. Yet some-
how Tali knew she would find the stranger somewhere in the bright
and early stillness.

Again, she felt the alien’s emanations before she saw it and learned
that it had been wandering since well before dawn, examining
sapsearchers and the like.

Instinctively, automatically, she took on the lineaments of the pre-
vious day’s disguise.

The stranger saw her and bared blunt white incisors in its single
mouth. Tali found the sight disconcerting but decided, after a pause,
that this was an indication of nonaggression rather than a declaration
of intent to eat her.

“ You came back " it said, making the crooning sounds that ex-
pressed thoughts. “/ hoped you would. Please, don't run away. I’m
harmless. See? I'm sitting down. And my hands are empty." It raised
two forelimbs and spread its tapering digits in some significant yet
obscure gesture. “ Please talk to me."

Tali marveled at the unfamiliar mode of communication. The myr-
iad of noises, the low growls, the high squeals. How very brave die
alien was to have come here with all of its pitiable limitations, ven-
turing away from its nest! And that nest was so very, very distant.
She could just barely see it in the stranger’s mind, and, in amazement ,
comprehend that the lights in the night sky were something other
than random odd cold glimmers. They meant life. Other places and
beings. It was a startling thought, one she tucked away for later con-
sideration.

“I’m a friend. Fiiend." Again, the odd gesture with the forepaws.
Something glinting and bright there. “ Can you understand me?”

The alien was quite strange and yet not exactly unpleasant to look
upon. The two jointed limbs above and two below were not wrong
so much as odd. The two eyes, tri-colored white, blue, black, balanced
precariously above what appeared to be two hooded orifices —
breath-holes? — and a single slash for a mouth: unexpected but not
exactly awful.

Her sense of it was that of an honorable being. The brain, while cer-
tainly strange and disorderly, contained no malice or evil that she
could perceive. The stranger seemed benign and eager — even des-
perate — for contact.

Tali had never been lonely, had no word for it in her clan’s lexicon,
and so she sensed rather than understood the feeling transmitted by
the alien. It had an agreeable poignancy.

“ Can you hear me?” the alien said. “Do you understand me at all?”
“Yes," she said, marveling at the sounds she produced from her odd
facsimile of one mouth. “Yes, I do.”

With surpassing gentle strangeness it told her that it was a human
and that it had come a very long way to meet her people and make
friends of them for its nest — a very large nest that it called Alliance.

In turn, she told it what it wanted to hear — after all, she could see
the desire right there in its mind, couldn’t she? So, yes, her people
were of its people. Humans, whatever those were.

“What’s your name?" It held a silvery egg in one of its paws and
waved it at her.

“Tali."

“A pretty name. I’m Ethan York, Tali.”

Ethan York. Mysterious and pleasing.

“Do you live here?”

What a foolish question. Where else? “Of course.”

“ How do you survive? What do you eat?”

She gave a noncommittal gesture. “Whatever I can find.”

“How did you get here?”

“My parents."

“And how did they get here?"

She hesitated. What should she say? In the stranger’s mind she saw
an image of metallic beads sliding from light to distant light. She
understood that they contained other beings.

“Like you did. In a silver bead."

“A ship? Like scouts? You mean they were Terran scouts?"

“ Terran scouts." Tali paused. What were those?

She sensed an effort on the alien’s part to contain sudden excite-
ment. It trembled slightly. “Incredible. They must have been part of
the Touchstar project."

Tali shrugged.

“Yeah, that makes sense. ” It moved its head back and forth, up and
down, several times. “I heard about those pioneer couples. Some
went out and never came back. But there aren’t any reports from
th is sector in the records."

“There aren't?" Sectors? Records?

“ That ion cloud near your planet really plays hell with trans-
missions, you know. That might account for it. But how in the
galaxy did your folks manage to land with their old style solid slate
navboards?"

“I don ’t know.” Tali nodded vigorously and showed her incisors
for good measure.

The Ethan York appeared confused by her response and she hastily
amended it, closing her mouth and casting her gaze to the ground.

“Well, even if they did la nd in one p iece, half their hardwa re was
probably fried. Mine nearly went on the ivay down and it’s made
of cerratech. No wonder they couldn’t report back,” the Ethan York
said. “But I still don’t get it. I’ve been scanning and I can’t find any
sign of human habitation. ’’The human stared at the silver egg in its
hand. “And your readings are all screivy, too.” Its eyes were sud-
denly hard, its stare suspicious. “You look human but you sure don't
come up that way.”

“I must go." She stood up.

“Not yet. Please."

But she was already turning away, moving behind a wide-trunked
fever free to cast off the image of Ethan York’s kind. She became one
with the forest, taking on the appearance of a stand of purple-
stemmed windflowers nodding yellow heads in the cool late breeze.

She could hear the human making comments to its egg: “She’s
disappeared again, I’m attempting to follow. Same odd readings
from nearby . . ."

Tali held her breath, heartlung aching. Would it follow her and,
with the help of those magical eggs it talked to, find her? What should
she do? Was it a threat to the nest?

A moment later, the alien came up behind her.

Tali’s heartlung felt as though it would burst.

The Ethan York paused, then hurried past as its strange silver egg
beeped, leading it off to the left through a mosode grove, and away.
Tali waited. Only when its mental emanations had faded to indeci-

pherable mutters did Tali shift back to her real form.

She sleet heavily that night and her dreams were filled with
odd noises and wide tricolored eyes. Once awake, she was preoccu-
pied by the Ethan York, but she kept her thoughts shielded for pro-
tection from the tribe. Outwardly she appeared unchanged: dutiful
Tali moving toward the orchard to gather fruit for tire evening meal.
But inside she quivered at the thought of seeing the stranger — her
stranger — again.

It’s dangerous, she thought. If tire Elders learn of this tlrey’ll be angry.
But I must see it again. Alone.

She told herself she would indulge her whim only one more time,
and never again after that. She told herself this although she knew
that she was lying.

The Ethan York was waiting for her in the meadow near
the orchard.

“Ah, you came back! I hoped you would.” It paused, obviously
pleased. “ But I’d hoped you would bring the others with you as
well.” So the stranger understood that there were others. Tali felt a
tiny bit alarmed.

“No,” she said. V came alone.”

It persisted maddeningly. “ When will I meet the others?”

“I don’t know.” Somehow she had to get it off that subject. “ Come
walk with me.”

She led it along leaf-strewn pathways, away from tire nestnround,
and deep into the groves of immature fever trees, their blooms tightly
furled into gold-speckled knots.

They walked for a long time, until the twin suns were blazing high
in tire green sky.

The human seemed to ei\joy tire journey. It made air odd melodi-
ous crooning sound in his throat — different from speech — as it
strode beside her, pausing now and then to exclaim over a rock or
sproutling, pulling out the silver egg and waving it above whatever
caught its fancy.

“What a fine day.” It reached out and took her hand. Tire sense of
its pleasure in the act was peculiar. And yet something about it
pleased Tali, pleased her immensely.

“Your eyes, Tali. They're so beautiful. So green.”

The human was veiy close to her.

“And your skin,” it said. “It looks as soft as velvet.”

She could feel its breath upon her face.

“May I touch you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

It touched the tip of its forelinrb to Tali’s disguise. Again she felt a
pleasure so intense that she was completely unprepared for the next
thing the stranger said.

“You ’re not really human, are you? But humanoid in appearance.”
Tali tensed.

“No, don’t pull away. You have nothing to fear from me. Whatever
you are, Tali, you’re exquisite Tell me about your people, please."
She hesitated, uncertain what to say.

7 — I can’t.”

“Winy?”

“It’s forbidden.”

“And who forbids it?”

“ The Elders.”

“Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me about these Elders.”
“I can’t. Please, Ethan York, don't ask me."

“Why not? Do they have some sort of power over you?”

“Yes."

“Then let me meet them."

“ You ask for the impossible.”

“ It’s my nature." The human paused soundlessly. It raised a linrb
and touched the side of her face. “ Beautiful ,” Ethan York said softly.
“Like a wildflower."

Tali trembled, but not from fear. She had received a startling
impression of intense ar ousal from the alien. To her surprise, she saw
that the Ethan York was male. Adult, male, and unmated.

“ Let me meet your Elders. Please."

“ You ask and ask for this thing. Why?"

The human seemed startled by the question. “To team, of course.
To talk with them and learn. How they — and you — live.”

“And what would you do with that knowledge?"

“Take it, back to my people, to share it with them ”

“And it would help them? This knowledge would help your
nest-mates?"

“Neslmates?” His eyes were still bright but lit now by a different,
colder light. “That’s an interesting term. Why do you call them that?"

Tali made no reply and looked down at the tangled roots beneath
her feet. She had already said too much.

“ Hmmm . The silent treatment, I guess you want me to change
the subject, ” The silver egg was in the human’s hand again. As Ethan
York fiddled with it Tali saw from his mind that it was a device to pre-
serve her words, like a Festival song. “Okay, ma’am,” he said. “How
about this: Have you seen any sign of others who live here? Dif-
ferent life forms?”

Tali thought for a moment of the nightfeeders. She hesitated.
What to say? Instinctively she decided not to give Ethan York quite
the response that he seemed to desire. “There is no one here but
my people.”

“Are there many of you?"

“No." Now, please, she thought, stop asking.

If she had understood chagrin, she would have felt it as tire human’s
mental output momentarily dimmed, then brightened once again.

“So this planet is undeipopulated?” he said. “ Interesting . It could
be a promising colony for the Alliance. We really have nothing in
this sector. And if you’re as close to humanoid as I think, your sur-
vival here would practically certify this place as safe for Homo sapi-
ens. I have to meet your Elders. To discuss a treaty."

The hunger. Newborn in his mind but red and dangerous. And yet
Ethan York wanted her assistance so badly that she could not help
wanting to give it. What was she to do?

“Come," said the human. “I want to show you something."

He led her along a winding trail, through a stand of odoberry
bushes whose branches were heavy with ripe green fmit, and into
a dealing.

A silvery ball sat there, a vision out of a dream.

“My ship." He strode up to it, passed his hands over it, and an open-
ing appealed in its side. “Come on. It’s perfectly safe.”

Curiosity warred with fear in Tali’s mind. “No, I don’t think I
should...”

“Oh, Tali, I’m harmless. But, okay.” Ethan York gestured.
“Wait there. I want you to hear something.” He disappeared
inside his vessel.

A moment later she heard the sound of a voice — his — talking.

“ What’s your name?

“Tali.” A higher, lilting voice. Hers?

“A pretty name. I’m Ethan York, Tali. Do you live here?"

“Of course.”

Ethan York popped back out of his vessel and showed his white
incisors. Tali stared at him. Was he some spirit casting a frightening
spell, stealing her voice? “ That was our conversation from before,”
she said. “How did you do that?”

“ It’s all in my computer, Tali, I’ve recorded everything you said.”
The human paused. “I hope you don’t mind,"

Tali waited until her heaitlung had calmed. Then she said, “Show
me this, this computer.”

Ethan York beckoned her inside and this time she went.

It was like a small silver cave, Tali thought, lined by row after
row of flickering lights. And there, nestled cozily, a bed with
orange cushions.

“Computer," Ethan York said. “Who am IT
Another voice, flat and grating, answered. “ Lieutenant Comman-
der Ethan York, currently assigned to the scoutship Free Bird.”
“And what is my mission?"

“To make contact with new mces and initiate diplomatic relations."
“By peaceful means?"

“ Affirmative . You have signed a non-aggression clause .”

Tali listened, wonderstruck. The words meant nothing to her but
the mere fact that Ethan York’s vessel could talk was impressive, lie
looked at her from time to time, nodding. Obviously, whatever was
being said was highly significant. She nodded back.

“There," he said. “See? Peaceful. Non-aggressive. It's in mg con-
tract. I’ve shown you my secrets, Tali. I’ve bared my throat. How
about you?”

He wanted, so badly. And so she lied. 7 must see my people," she
said. “I’ll tell them that you're here and request a meeting."

The alien showed his teeth. “Wonderful! I’ll come with you "

“No." Tali wished that he would close his
mouth. “You would upset them.” That, at
least, was true.

“Then I'll ivalk you there and wait outside
for an answer."

“No, please. It must be done delicately.

Tomorro w. We’ll meet near here."

“What time?” The red hunger again, pulsing.

“The same time."

Ethan York seemed to accept her proposal
but. she saw in his mind that when she left he
intended to follow her, to spy upon her. How
foolish this creature was. But somehow so
appealing, too.

Again, she left him easily, one moment
there, the next gone.

“Tali, wait!”

His voice faded behind her, caught by the
wind and tossed away.

The human wandered away, calling her
name.

Nearby a tree-stump shimmered in the
waning sunlight, shifted, and became a
familiar shape. Dolinin. His green crest was
rigid in fury.

His rim of red eyes gleamed and he clicked
his beaks in anger. — Tali, you’ve broken
tribal law.

— And you’ve been spying, Dolinin. How
dare you?

— I have some rights in this matter.

— You have no rights whatsoever.

— You allowed it to touch you! It should
be killed.

— You should be killed, Dolmin. For stu-
pidity. And cowardice. Hiding and spying!

Run along back to the cave.

— Tali, I won’t have my future mate put the tribe at risk.

— Risk? Don’t be a fool.

— Perhaps if you were kinder to me 1 could overlook this . . .

He moved closer.

Even as she pulled back Tali knew she should ay ole and pacify
him, promise and plead. But he had angered her as he always did and
that, in turn, made her reckless.

— And perhaps I’ll tell my mother to nullify our betrothal. I will, if
you don’t stop spying on me.

— Beware, Tali.

She made the sign for fury. — Begone!

Dolmin took an angry swipe at her with several of his moutharms.
She ducked him easily. His crest was fully engorged now, bright green
and throbbing. Tali laughed derisively at the sight of it.

Dolmin stared at her for a long moment with love in his eyes, then
turned and left her in the grove.

Stolid, singleminded Dolmin, she thought. Did he ever wonder
what the lights were in the night sky? Did he ever even bother to
look up?

THAT NIGHT THE FESTIVAL FIRES LEAPED HIGH AS TALI SAT WITH HER

agemates and eryoyed the final group loving. All came away renewed
and enriched. The extra nest space was certainly welcome. Tali won-
dered: did Ethan York’s people have Festival? Did they share love?

After the loving, a representative of the Elders council
approached her.

— Come.

Tali felt as if every one of her moutharms had turned to stone, too
heavy to move. But refusal was unthinkable. She forced herself to go
forward, step after dreadful step, following the messenger back to the
council chamber.

It was the largest cave of the nestmound, a smooth-sided ovoid in
which the Elders rested easily. They were
arrayed for Festival and obviously annoyed
at the necessity of meeting before reciting the
ritual tale. Dolmin was among them, his eyes
hooded and baleful, his crest nearly flat.

Tali wheezed with fright.

— Tali, we are at risk and you have done
this.

— Sacred elders, no!

— Don’t attempt to lie. You were observed.
— Please, tliis one begs your understanding.
— Silence! Didn’t you meet with a stranger
against all clan rules? You have willfully bro-
ken our code and endangered the nest.

Another Elder mindspoke her. — You have
little value to the nest You aren’t yet of brood
age and your mother has several other daugh-
ters. There are many among us who would
have you ended.

Ended? Never again to see the twin suns in
the sky? Tali couldn’t bear the thought. —
This one begs clemency.

— As did your mother, who is overfond.
However, in regal’d for her standing among
us we have tempered our judgment. Stand
ready to receive our final word.

Tali felt as if her heartlung would vibrate
right out of her body.

— This stranger must die. You will help to
lead him to t he dust pits beyond the forest.
Tomorrow.

— But . . .

— You will be ended if we must intervene
in this matter. And your family will be dis-
graced forever.

The dust pits! Dark and loathsome chasms
at the edge of the trees. To lure Ethan York to
the pits, to his end? No. It was awful, impossible. She would have to
save him somehow. But she gave no sign of what she was thinking,
shielded her thoughts, and instead, made the expected response.

— It will be as you say, Oh Wisest.

— Good. Now you may rejoin us at the fires.

She made a show of accompanying the Elders back to the Festival
cave. But as soon as possible she pulled herself back into the crowd
and went off to her comer to think.

That night Tali slept a cold, dreamless sleep. The suns were both
high in the sky by the time she emerged from the nest. The words of
the Elders rang in her mind.

— This stranger must die . . .

The way to t he dust pits took her through a mosode grove. She
looked up, saw dust billowing in red clouds above the trails between
the ancient nestmounds, and knew that the human, Ethan York, was
approaching.

“TaliV he called. “Where are you? Don’t be frightened. Please. I
want to see you. You promised."

“I’m here,” she called. “Just a little way farther down the path.
Beyond the trees. I'm waiting with the Elders." She peered out

Continued on page 95

Did he euer

wonder what

the lights were

in the 5KL|?

Did he euer
euen bother to

The far future will be so different from today as to be almost unrecognizable.
But in many fundamental ways, nothing will have changed at all.

Ten thousand light years from ns home nem the center of
the galaxy, the Kni ship warped the void of space-time.

| ; [ I hen Tahiti I a was two, her mother

| I 1 j I changed sex. Thai, didn't bother Tabil ha,

| j I but her father moved out.

j ! | “Will lie come back?” she asked. Site

I stood dwarf-like between (he Graceland-
I stylecoluinnsatlhefrontofherhou.se.

I I Mechanical sheep mowed l he lawn,

j I | j | Mother scratched his new beard, look-

i ing pensive. “I don’t think so. He's gone to

join the Pulaski group mind, like your
grandfather did. It’s like getting married.”

Tabitha already knew what a group mind was, because she’d asked
her augment, the part of her brain that was beyond human. It had
been implanted when she was one year old.

“Will I many the Pulaskis someday?”

Her mother smiled. “Maybe you’ll marry Richard instead.”

Tabitha made a face. “Richard is a boy.”

“Boys aren’t so bad,” her mother said defensively. “I like being one."
Tabitha looked up at the artificial blue sky, where children
played in the gravity-free zone around an ansible lower. Richard
was probably among them. As always, the bright yellow sun
shone directly overhead, and the horizon blurred to infinity in all
directions.

“I’m going to talk to Grandfather,” she said. She let her augment
take over her senses, and her mother vanished.

She found herself in one of the orbit labs, which supervised the
transportation of raw materials from the outer worlds to the shell
around the sun. The air smelled of chicken soup and ozone, and
Chopin’s Sonata #2 fought with the hum of machinery Her grandfa-
ther drifted in free fall before a projection showing the nibble that
was all that was left of Jupiter.

“Hello, Tabitha,” he said, his augment sensing heis.

“’Lo,” she said, nodding politely “Is Father part of you now?"

“We are becoming. It’s a process, like building the house for the sun.”
“I’m a process, too,” she said.

His face crinkled into a smile. “A veiy pretty process.”

“What will you do with Father?”

“Do you know how much longer it
will be until the machines finish the
Dyson sphere?”

“Thirty years, one hundred twelve
days, five hours, fifty-six minutes and five
seconds,” she said, reciting from her
augment. “Terrestrial time,” she added.

Grandfather nodded. “And then what happens?”

“All the light stays in the house.”

"What if someone’s watching from outside?”

“They’ll see the sun go out.”

Her grandfather nodded. “We think someone’s watching. Your
father will help us find out”

IN THE REAL-TIME OF LIGHT, THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HIACK STONE
on the galactic rim had not yet begun. But in the no-time of ansi-
ble transmissions, the construction proceeded at a furious pace.
The Kni ship drained energy from suns along its path, traversing
light-years in mere hours of ansible time.

When Tabitha was four, her mother asked her if she liked cats.

“I like them,” Tabitha said carefully, “but I don’t want to become one.”
Her mot her shook his head. “Gene-morphing doesn’t turn you into
an animal. It just gives you some of the characteristics. You can have
a cute kitty face without being a cat.”

“I like my face the way it is," said Tabitha politely. “Richard has a
tail, and it’s always getting stepped on.”

“You look so drab among the other children. Their parents will
think I’ve taken religious vows.”

“I’ll explain if anyone asks.”

Her mot her sighed.

Tabitha looked across the plain, where a gas whale floated over a
field of potato-bean plants. Artificial wind blew the crop in slow
green waves.

“Grandfather” — she corrected herself — “The Pulaski group mind
showed me a projection of the A-wave. They think it started at the
galactic core.”

"What? What’s an A-wave?”

“Don’t you ever talk wit h your augment? It’s the ansible anom-
aly. It’s ...” Her voice t railed off as she decided it would be rude
for a four-year old to explain current events to her mother.

“Tabitha,” said her mother, looking her
straight in the eye. “You’re a little girl. You
don’t need to think all the time — that’s what
group minds are for. And dust me, group sex
is more fun. Now go play.”

The

SunHOUSE

Trhp

BY GEORGES. WALKER
Illustration by William Stoneham

“Yes, Mother.”

“And don’t wait up! I’ve got another date with Merilee and Zana
tonight. Have Kitchen make you something decadent for supper.”

Far behind the Krii ship, over a thousand huge spheres
orbited in stasis around the black hole. The Krii had been extinct for
billions of years, but the collection — and the collector machine —
remained.

When Tabitha was eight, she escaped from the party where
Richard was showing off his new tentacles, and walked all the way
to the Pulaski Institute.

Her father sat her down in his chair and showed her an image of
the Stone Garden.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “What is it?”

“The center of the Milky Way, and the answer to the Fermi paradox,
which says — ”

“I know what the Fermi paradox is,” Tabitha interrupted. She
quickly studied her father’s face to make sure she hadn’t offended
him. “So the reason no alien civilization has ever contacted us is that
they’re all here?” Thoughtfully she traced her small finger through
the image. “This is the event horizon of the black hole at the center
of our galaxy, and the orbiters are Dyson spheres like our own, right?
Since each sphere is a different radius, I’d guess that each was cre-
ated by natives of a different star system.”

Her father nodded, waiting expectantly.

She looked at him quizzically. “But our telescopes can’t see any-
thing near a black hole, because there’s not enough illumination.”

“It was captured via ansible, Tabitha.”

“But to do that, you’d need an ansible transmitter at the core. My
augment says the farthest ansible is less than twenty light years
from the sun.”

“Who do you believe?” he said with mock gruffness. “Your father
or your augment?”

She smiled. “I believe the Pulaski group mind.” She continued
to trace the image, looking at his face. “Is this a good thing or a
bad thing?”

“The garden is dead,” he said soberly, “and the A- wave is coming
straight toward us.”

The Krii <had been afraid. But because they'd been the first
civilization in the galaxy, it was their privilege to ensure that they
were the only one. They built, the collector machines to seek out bud-
ding civilizations, freeze them in stasis, and imprison them in
orbit around the black hole.

Y THE TIME TABITHA WAS SIXTEEN, RICHARD HAD
changed sex five times, a different one each time.
Tabitha’s mother had gene-morphed to become sexless,
and taken up aroma therapy as a hobby. Her short-
cropped hair was the color of snow.

Mother sat in the center of the house gravity field,
dipping a brush into tiny scent bottles and painting
the contents on each fingernail. It sniffed the results
critically.

“What do you think?” asked Mother, holding its
hand out to Tabitha.

“Smells like lilacs and isopropyl alcohol and ... tofu?”

Mother rolled its eyes. “At least you got the lilacs right.” It leaned
over to look at what Tabitha was doing. “Aren’t you a little old to be
playing with model rocket ships?"

The pieces floated in the air as Tabitha manipulated them with
her augment.

“It’s a prototype of the probe they’ll send out to look at the A-
wave front,” she explained. “The Takahara group mind has a theory
for a faster-than-light drive.” Tabitha floated two pieces toward
Mother with her augment. “That one’s a normal antimatter con-
tainment pod, and that one’s the Takahara drive — if they can get
it to work.”

Mother sniffed. “Well, of course it doesn’t work. It doesn’t even
smell right.”

The Krii ship had watched races evolve, different stages in
different order. Each invented new ways to harness energy, new
ways to travel. And ultimately, each discovered the ansible, the trip-
wire of its doom.

By Tabitha’s thirty-second birthday, the Dyson sphere was com-
plete, but part of it was already being disassembled to construct
escape arks. Tabitha had a new augment that could solve N-body
orbital problems a million times faster than her old one. Mother had
become a red-headed female and cloned herself.

“We can’t understand why you won't do it," said Mothers. “One of
us stays here and the other goes to tire Centauri system. It’s win-win
either way. Until the launch, we do everything together to maintain
the nature-nurture match: identical twins.” They nodded in unison.

“Centauri isn’t like Sol, Mothers. It’s a trinary system, so it can’t be
Dysoned. Whoever goes there will be living in shield-domes on small
planetoids.”

“Richard’s going,” purred Mothers seductively. “Two of them, a man
and a woman. And two Richards will stay here.”

“Good for Richard,” said Tabitha “He always kept up with the trends.”

“Well, if there’s one tiring you need, Tabitha, it’s to spend more time
on your love life. What happened to the last man we set you up with,
that Adolph fellow?”

“The one who tried to tattoo my breasts on our first — and
only — date?”

“You had a good time, didn’t you?”

Tabitha shook her head.

“What will you do?” said Mothers. “You don’t want to get cloned,
and you don’t want to join the Centauri cruise.”

“I’m going to join tire Pulaski group mind. The Takahara probe is
well on its way, and the Pulaskis want another perspective on ana-
lyzing tire data it returns.”

Mothers sighed. “You think too much. Haven’t we talked to you
about that?”

The Krii ship saw the ansible-spark cross the wave front of its
defense. The spark ivas superluminal, a space-time machine from
the rim. For an instant, it continued traveling faster than light,
then exploded. The collector machine left the debris far behind it.

“You’re leaving me?” said Mother. Her mouth hung open in
disbelief.

Mother had redecorated the house as a Mongolian yurt, and dis-
sonant bleating came from holographic goats.

Tabitha was sixty-four, nearing the prime of her life. It occurred to
her that, as part of the group mind, she had already left Mother twice
before: once as husband and once as father.

“I’ve been chosen to pilot one of the Takahara ships in the attack
against the Stone Collector,” she explained. “They need a group nrind
intimately familiar with our knowledge of the Stone Collector and
ansible theory, but strong enough to survive. I’ll go as an extension
of the Pulaski group mind, augment-linked by ansible.”

“When will you be back?”

“In twenty-four years, seventy-five days, local time. Of course, I’ll
be younger when I get back, due to time-reversal.”

“I’ll be an old woman ...” Mother’s voice trailed off.

“Nonsense, Mother. You can be anything you want.” She gently
kissed her mother-wife-daughter on the cheek. “See you when I
get back.”

The Krii ship hadn't changed in billions of years. It remem-
bered battles icon, never lost. Yet somehow, its own world had died.
One by one, so had its fellow collector machines. But the order to
protect remained.

By the time the fleet neared the A-wave front, FTL time dis-

tortion had reduced Tabitha’s age to thirty-two. Her augment had
kept her mind from regressing, and ansible-updated nanomachines
had done the same for equipment, including Tabitha’s augment. Her
ship was the last in the chain of eight.

From Sol, Father’s thoughts joined hers: “The Takaharas will get
enough honor as it is,” he grumbled. “They should have let all the
ships release disassemblers at once.”

“The Pulaskis have a long tradition of sweeping up after the gen-
erals,” answered a thought from her grandfather. “But this time,
everyone will watch how we hold the broom.”

“Quiet," said Tabitha “I need to concentrate.” Then she wondered
if she'd already said that, or was planning to. The time distortion and
updates from the augment provided a constant buzz of confusion.

The lead Takahara ships were broadcasting data from the A-wave
front, which spread across ten light years. The first probe, years
before, had made the mistake of flying into the center of the wave and
been destroyed instantly. This fleet’s line was a wide spiral.

“One and two, passing through the wave,” said a Takahara voice.
The two ships vanished. The wave swallowed their ansible sig-
natures.

“Did they release disassemblers?” asked the Takahara mind
from Sol.

“No sign,” said a mind from another ship. “They may have released
behind the front”

“Ships three and four, release on contact,” ordered the Taka-
hara mind.

“Coming up ... Now!”

Both ships vanished.

“Anything on scan?”

“They must have released too late," someone offered.

“But what happened to the ships?!”

Tabitha fought to maintain a train of thought and analyze the data.
“Tabitha,” asked the Pulaski mind, “what do you see?”

“See? Nothing. Light can’t keep up.”

“Five and six, release before contact.”

“Now?”

“Now!”

Tabitha’s augment informed her of the release, hundreds of minia-
ture Takahara drives launching toward the wave. Then the ships van-
ished, along with the disassemblers.

“What do we do?” asked Tabitha’s counterpart in ship seven.

“I don’t know. I can’t flunk. I can’t think at all!”

“We’re thinking for you,” said the Pulaski mind.

“But you don’t have a plan!”

“Release now,” said the Takahara mind.

The approaching A-wave filled the sensors. Tabitha had a fleeting
thought, which faded in the time stream. Or maybe she was going to
have a thought. Her augment selected the release switch for her. All
she had to do was allow it Ship seven released disassemblers.
“Eight! Release now!”

“I need to think,” said Tabitha. She selected the emergency shut-
down switch for the Takahara drive.

“Tabitha! What are you doing?!”

She shut down.

Seven ansible-sparks crossed the wave front. Traveling faster
than light, each was abruptly cut off from its command center on
the rim, which had kept it from unraveling in time. As the Krii
ship watched, parts of each ship regressed to before its completion
date. Antimattei' containment fields receded to before turn-on, con-
tents streaming fiee to combine with normal matter.

Tabitha’s ship dropped into real time.

The wave passed through her. And for the first time since leaving
solar orbit, she could flunk clearly. There was no touch of the Pulaski
group mind, no update instructions from her augment Tabitha sighed
in relief.

She thought a message to the group mind: “I’m on the other side of
the wave.”

There was no answering thought, only peace and quiet. She heard
her own restful breathing.

Stars shone all around, proof positive that she was in real-time.
She saw sparkles of light that were not stars: dispersing clouds of
matter and antimatter, annihilating each other atom by atom. Sen-
sore showed the receding A-wave, still heading toward Sol.

In the other direction, something rushed toward her silently from
the galactic core. In the blink of an eye, it sped past: a false image of
the Stone Collector, light delayed. A minute later, another passed,
and then another. Tabitha realized the alien drive was nothing like the
Takahara drive. It dipped in and out of real time like a wave, leaving
a long trail of ghosts behind.

“Let’s see what you look like,” she whispered.

Listening to Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, she played back
tlie images in slow motion. The Stone Collector ship was tinier than
she expected, perhaps fifty kilometers long. Whatever had happened
to the ships of her fleet, they hadn’t collided with it

Tabitha studied the Stone Collector images carefully; there was still
time to defeat it She took a deep breath and consulted her augment.

T IaBITHA’S MOTHER WALKED — SOMETHING SHE WASN’T
accustomed to doing — up to the front door of the
Pulaski Institute and blinked in the flash of its ID scanner.
The delicate fairy wings growing from her shoulders pre-
vented her from wearing her jet pack. After waiting a few
seconds, she pounded on the ornate iron doors with both
fists.

The doors creaked apart a minute later. Her ex-husband
stood before her.

“Where’s my daughter?” she shouted.

He opened his mouth to speak, hesitated and swallowed. “I already
told you, we don’t think she survived. We lost contact with all the
ships, and — ’’

“But you have her. She’s part of the Pulaski mind. You have her
and I don’t!” She wiped away a tear that had started down one
cheek.

He shook his head. “A group mind doesn’t work that way. We work
together, think together, but when one of us dies ...”

Her father appeared in the doorway.

“Pumpkin, you have to accept that she’s gone. She tried her best
and we — ”

“Don’t call me Pumpkin! I’m ninety-two years old and I won’t be
called Pumpkin anymore.” She began to cry. “I told her. I told her to
clone herself.”

Her ex-husband reached out and pulled her toward him, hug-
ging her.

“Ouch!” She winced. “Careful with my wings!”

Tabitha, slowly gaining on the Stone Collector, had regressed
to sixteen. The ansible transmissions from Earth were still blocked.
But from the other direction, the computer she’d left behind sent
update instructions via ansible to her augment and the nanoma-
chines. She longed for a time when she could think, without the dis-
orientation of time reversal and reteaching from her augment.

The trailing edge of the A-wave loomed before her. In her own
voice, the computer left behind told her where the alien ship was,
exactly when it was blinking in and out of real time.

“Can you scratch for fleas?” said Tabitha. She launched the first
disassembler.

One by one, each time the Stone Collector dropped into real time,
she released another, until there were no more.

She followed, sending ansible updates to the disassemblers.

THE MALFUNCTIONS WERE INSIGNIFICANT A SENSOR FAILURE HERE, A
minor hull breach there. Slowly they added up. By the time the Krii
ship sought out a star system to mine raw materials for repairs,
there were thousands of malfunctions. By the time it found a planet,
there were millions.

Continued on page 85

Without the Voice, there came a choice. Hair hoped she had the
strength to make the right one.

THE

VOICE

BY GREGORY BENFORD
Illustration by Rick Berry

DON’T BELIEVE IT,” QENT SAID STERNLY.

Klair tugged him down the musty old corridor.
“Come on, turn off your Voice. Mine is — I
showed you."

“Stuff on walls, whoever heard of — ”

“There’s another one further along.”

Down the narrow, dimly lit hallway they went,
to a recessed portion of the permwall. “See —
another sign.”

“This? Some old mark. What’s a ‘sign’ anyway?”
“Tliis one says — ” she shaped the letters to her-
self carefully — ’’PASSAGE DENIED."

Qent thumbed on his Voice impatiently. He
blinked. “That’s . . . what the Voice says.”

“See?”

“You’ve been here before and (he Voice told you.”
“I let you pick the corridor, remember? A
fair trial.”

“You cheated.”

“No! I can read it." Read. The veiy sound of the
word made her pulse thump.

Qent paused a second and she knew he was
consulting the Voice again. “And ‘read’ means to
untangle things, I see. This ‘sign’ tells you PAS-
SAGE DENIED? How?”

“See those? — they’re letter's. I know each one
— there are twenty-six, it takes a lot of work —
and together they shape words.”

“Nonsense,” Qent said primly.
______ “Your mouth shapes words.”

‘ it’s a smart strategy. When

the buzzards just gl

“I have another way. My way.”

He shook his head and she had to take him on to another sign and
repeat the performance. He grimaced when the Voice told him that
indeed, the markings meant ALDENTEN SECTOR. “A trick. Your
Voice is on. You just rigged your touchpad — ”

“Here, take my insert!” She thrust it into his hand and made him
walk to the next emblem. “MANUFAC DIST, that way.”

“I know an arrow when I see it,” he said sarcastically. But the rest
of it — what’s DIST mean?”

She had hoped he wouldn’t ask that. “Maybe it means a place.”
“Like a neighborhood?”

“Could be — in fact, yes, ‘district’. If there wasn’t room to write it
all out, they’d shorten a word.”

“And who were ‘they’? Some magicians?”

“The ancients, I guess.”

He was working his way around to being convinced, she could see.
“They left wall marks? What for, when the Voice — ”

“Maybe they came before the Voice.”

“But what possible use — ”

“I learned all this from those old papers I uncovered in the His-
torical Section. They were called ‘Bills of Lading’ but there were
enough words — ”

“How do you know you can ‘read’ something? I mean, without
checking with the Voice?”

“I know. The letters group together, you see — MANUFAC is just
‘man’ and this upturned letter is the sound ‘you’, and — ”

“You’re going too fast.” He grimaced, obviously not liking this at
all. He was a biology specialist and tolerated her interest in antiquity,
but finally he said, “Okay, show me again. Not that I really believe
this, but ...”

HEY SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS IN THE
oldest precinct of the Historical Sector,
searching out corridors that the Imperium
had not gotten around to Voicing. Klair
read him signs and he started picking up
the method. Progress was slow; reading
was hard. Letters, words, then working up
to grasping how sentences and then para-
graphs had their logic and rhythms, their
clues about how to extract meaning.

Still, it wasn’t as though he were some
Deedee, after all. After a while she
recalled from her Educational Specialty training that Deedees were
actually officially called the Developmentally Delayed. So if some-
one had once taken just the first letters of both words, that was how
they had gotten their name.

Everything went well between them and they got to like having
their Voices off while they strolled through die antiquated hallways,
making sense of the signs.

The Voice was always available if they needed it Linkchips embed-
ded near both ears could pick up the pervasive waves of CompCen-
tral. They only had basic link, no frills but constant access. Like every-
body, they had used the Voice more as time went on; it was so easy.

But reading gave them a touch of the past and some silence. It was
a relief, really.

They had kept their Voices nearly always on. It was easy to get
used to the Voice’s silky advertisements that floated just within hear-

ing. You could pay the subscriber service for the Voice and have no
ads, but none of their friends did; it was far too expensive. And any-
way, the ads told you a lot about people. There was a really interest-
ing one for sperm and egg donors to the gay/les bank, a Meritocracy
program to help preserve the Gay gene. It had zoomer sonics and life
histories and everything. You could amp it and hear a whole half-hour
show if you wanted. For free, too. But most weren’t anywhere near
that good, so they were glad to be rid of them.

Reading, though, grew on them. There were advantages to reading
old signs that the Voice didn’t bother to translate. They showed off
to a few friends but nobody believed they could really read the curi-
ous markings. It had to be some trick, for sure. Klair and Qent just
smiled knowingly and dropped the subject.

Not that it was all good. At an old intersection Qent honored the
GO signal by reading it, rather than listening to his Voice. The signal
was off synch and he nearly got flattened by a roller car.

They debated whether to tell anyone in authority. After all, maybe
nobody knew this.

“Ummm, no," Qent said. “Look at it this way — carrion eaters
rule the world, in their way. Because nobody cares. Nobody wants
what they like.”

“So we’d be fools to make other people like reading?”

“Demand rises, supplies fall. Suppose everybody wanted those old
books you found?”

She had to admit it was a sobering possibility. Tire carrion-eater
analogy came out of his biology training, and he couldn’t resist
adding, “It’s a smart strategy. When times are tough on everybody,
the buzzards just get more to eat.”

The thought was so disgusting she decided to forget about the
whole question.

They came to like strolling the byways of the Megapolis, ferreting
out the antiquated secrets of the signs. Lovers often find their own
rituals, and this was a particularly delectable one.

Outside one vaultway there were clearly marked instructions on
how to spin a dial and get in. They had to work on it for quite a while
but finally they made it work. The door swung open on primitive
hinges and they walked into a musty set of rooms. Exploring them
proved boring; just stacks of locked compartments, all without signs.
Until a guard came in with a drawn zapper.

“How’d you kids get in here?”

“It was open, sir,” Qent said. He had always been quick and
Klair supposed his answer was technically correct. She had
opened the door.

“How the hell — ? Well, get out. Out!"

He was confused and worried and hardly gave them more than a
brief search. Qent asked to see the zapper, imitating a dumbo kid,
and the guard brushed them off, still puzzled.

Until the vault she had not realized that her hard-won trick
was anything more than a delicious secret. Klair was a scholarly type
and epjoyed her hours of scanning over the decaying sheets she
found in the Historical Sector’s archives.

The fat ones she learned were called “books” and there was even
an entry in tire Compendium about them. The Voice recited tire entry
to her in its soft tones, the ones she had chosen for her daily work.
She used a more ornate voice for social matters and a crisp, precise
one for directions. In normal life that was all anyone needed, a set of
pleasing Voice agents.

times (IVe tough on everybody,

more to eat”

There was hardly any delay when she requested the book entry
and the Voice told a marvelous tale. There were many kinds of books,
including one called “novel”. This meant new the Voice said. But the
one novel Klair found in the dank, dark Antiquities Vault was obvi-
ously old, not new at all. Such confusions were inevitable in research,
she realized.

Books were known also as buchs in some ancient sources, it said,
in the confusing era when there were competing Voices. Not really
even Voices, either, but whole different speech-methods, before Stan-
dard was discovered.

All that happened in the Narrow Age, as antiquarians termed it. A
time of constrained modes, hopelessly linear and slow. People then
were divided by their access to information. Thank goodness such
divisive forces were now banished.

They now lived in the Emergent Age, of course. The Voice had
emerged from the evolution of old style Intelligent Agents, on
computers. Those would perform fetch-’em tasks. Gradually, peo-
ple let their Agents do more and more. Agent merging led to more
creativity, coming from the overlap of many voices, many threads
in a society where all was open and clear to all, available through
the Voice.

“What sop!” Qent said to this, and she sort of agreed. The Narrow
Age sounded fascinating, with its books and reading. The tingling
tlirill of being able to hold a year’s worth of Voice talk in your hand,
opening it to anywhere you chose, picking out lore at will — it cap-
tivated her.

Of course, she knew the Voice was superior. Instantly it could skip
to any subject or even word you liked in any record. It would explain
in private, sounding just like an enormously smart person speaking
to you alone, in your head. Everybody had one and could access it
with an internal signal.

She looked up the Voice itself in one of the old books. The words
were hard to follow and she began to wish for some way to find out
what they meant Sounding them out was hard because, even when
she knew the word, the mapping from letters to sounds followed
irregular rules. “What’s the point of that?” Qent asked often, but he
kept at it with her.

The books said that the Voice had started as an aid to people called
“illiterates” — and Klair was startled to find, consulting the Voice,
that everybody was one. Except her and Qent, now.

Once, lots and lots of people could read. But as the Voice got eas-
ier to use, a certain cachet attached to using only the Voice. Inde-
pendence from linear “print-slavery” became fashionable, then uni-
versal. After all, the Voice could pipe the data you needed on fast-flow,
a kind of compressed speech that was as fast (or in fact, by that time,
faster) as people could read.

Most people got their information by eye, anyway. In a restaurant,
they ordered chicken by touching the drumstick icon, or fish by the
fishstick icon. And of course most of their time they spent at enter-
tainments, which had to be visual, tactile, smell-rich — sports, 3Ds,
sensos, a-morphs, realos.

She found it quite delicious to have an obscure, secret talent that
none of her friends even guessed. She was going to have a party and
show them all, but then she saw the big letters in die Boulevard of
Aspiration, and tilings got complicated.

Qent said, “I make it to be —

SAVVY THIS? MEAT 13:20 @ Y.”

Skeptically he eyed the poorly printed letters written in livid red on
a blue wall.

“Somebody did that by hand,” Klair marveled.

“Writing by yourself? How?”

“I hadn’t thought anybody could. I mean, machines make letters,
don’t they?”

“You’re the one read all those historical books. Printing machines
gave way to Voice machines, you said.”

Klair traced a hand over the misshapen letters. “It’s like making a
drawing, only you try to imitate a machine, see? Think of letters as
little art objects.”

“This isn’t an art exhibit.”

“No, it’s a message. But maybe I can ...”

By luck she had in her side-sack her latest cherished discovery, a
fat book called “Dictionary”. It had many more words in it than the
Voice, approximating and vernacular. Big words that nobody used
any more, hadn’t used for so long even the Voice didn’t know them.
It even told her that “@” meant “at”, but not why.

“Here,” she pointed forcefully at the tiny little entry. “Meat is the
flesh of an animal.”

“Animals do that. I heard that people used to.”

“Primitivo!” she said scornfully.

“It may mean that in there, but it sounds like ‘meet’.”

“Somebody made an error? Confusing the sound with another word?”
“Somebody wants people who can read the sign to meet them.”
“Other readers.”

“Where?” He frowned.

“It says T. That’s not a word.”

“Maybe it’s an abbreviation, like that MANUFAC DIST?”

“No, too short.”

He snapped his fingers. “Remember where the Avenue of Aspira-
tion branches? You can look down on it from the balcony of the
Renew building. From above, it looks like that letter.”

“Let’s be there, then.”

They showed up, but nobody else did. Instead, at the Y another
crude hand-lettered sign said
MEAT CORRIDOR 63, 13:30 TOMORROW, BLOCK 129
They went home and turned off their Voices and talked. Most cou-
ples silenced the Voice only during sex. This was merely polite, even
though of course no other person could be sure it was off nowadays,
what with the new neuroactivated models.

They went home and sped-read some ancient texts. There was a
thick book titled The Lust of the Mahicans that Qent had seen on
senso. She read it — her speed was a lot higher than his — ■ but it
wasn’t anything like the senso he had seen. There was no sex in it at
all. Just stares of infinite longing and heavy breathing and pounding
pulses and stuff like that. Still, she found it oddly stirring. Reading
was funny that way.

They could not get their minds off the sign. Qent was out of sorts,
irked that others had mastered their discovery. He groused about it
vaguely and found excuses to change the subject
Klair didn’t see it possessively. After all, the higher moral good was
to share. Reading was wickedly single-ist. Was that why she liked it
so much? A reader was isolated, listening to a voice no one else could
take part in. That led to differences and divisions, friction and clashes.

Still, the rapture of reading — of listening to silent sounds from
ages past — was too, well, perhaps the right word was titillating.

Once, lots and lots of people could
to use, a certain cachet attache*

She was excited by the prospect of other readers. Inevitably, they
went to the site.

The man who slouched beside a rampway was not impressive.
Medium height, Iris crimson codpiece was three years out of date. His
hair was stringy and festooned with comically tattered microbirds.
He said nothing, simply handed them a sheet. Miserably printed sen-
tences covered both sides. The fust paragraph was enough for Klair.

THE SECRET ASSEMBLY OF READERS MUST UNITE! WE
HAVE A TALENT THE MASSES CANNOT UNDERSTAND. THEY
WILL FEAR US IF THEY KNOW. A BROTHERHOOD AND SIS-
TERHOOD OF READERS IS THE ONLY SOLUTION TO OUR ISO-
LATION. ARISE!

“What cliche sop!” She thrust the sheet back at him.

“True, though.”

Qent said sharply, “Just tell us what you — ”

“You never know when the Voice is on,” the man said mysteriously.
Klair said, “And your printing is awful."

“Better than yours,” he said shrewdly.

“That’s not the point,” Qent said. “We demand to know — ”

“Come on. And shut up, hull?”

They were in a wildness preserve before the man spoke. “I’m
Marq. No Voice pickups here, at least according to the flow charts.”
“You're an engineer?” Klair asked, admiring the oaks.

“I’m a philosopher. I make my money engineering."

“How long have you been reading?”

“Years. Started with some old manuals I found. Figured it out from
scratch.”

“So did we," Qent said. “It’s hard, not being able to ask for help
from the Voice.”

Marq nodded. “I did. Dumb, huh?”

“What happened?”

“Some Spectors came by. Just casual talk, y’know, but I knew what
they were after.”

“Evidence?” she asked uneasily.

“When I asked the Voice there was a pause, just a little one. A pri-
ority shift, I know how to spot them. So I broke off and took the
books I had to a hiding place. When I got back there were the Spec-
tom, cool as you like, just kind of looking around my room."

“You didn’t tell them . . . ?” she asked.

“You got to give them something. I had a copy of tliis tiling about
books that I couldn’t understand, Centigrade 233. Kept it biuied under
a pseud-bush bed. They were getting funny on me so I took it out and
gave it to them.”

She blinked, startled. “What did they do? Arrest you?”

Marq gave her a crooked grin. “Reading’s not illegal, y’know. Just
anti, that’s all. So they let me off with six weeks of grouping.”

“Wow, do I hate those," Qent said.

Marq shrugged. “I did the time. They poked at me and I had to pre-
tend to see the light and all. They kept the book.”

“You’re brave,” Klair said.

“Just stupid. I should never have asked the Voice.”

Qent said earnestly, “You’d think the Voice would encourage us to
learn. I mean, it’d be useful in emergencies. Say the Voice goes down,
we could read the info we’d need.”

Marq nodded. “I figure the Voice reads. It just doesn’t want
competition.”

She said, “The Voice is a machine.”

“So?" Marq shrugged again. “Who knows how small it is?”

“It’s a service,” Qent said. “That’s all.”

“Notice how it won’t store what we say?” Marq smiled shrewdly.

Qent nodded. “It says it’s trying to improve our memories.”

“Reading was invented to replace memory,” Klair said. “I read it in
a history book.”

“So it must be true?” Marq shrugged derisively, a gesture that was
beginning to irk Klair a lot.

She hated politics and this was starting to sound like that. “How
many books have you got?"

“Lots. I found a tunnel into a vault. I can go there anytime.”

Qent and Klair gasped at Ills audacity as he described how for years
he had burrowed into sealed-off chambers, many rich in decaying
documents and bound volumes. He spoke of exotica they had never
seen, tomes which were nothing but names in the Dictionary: Ency-
clopedias, Thesauruses, Atlases, Alamancs. He had read whole vol-
umes of the fabled Britannica!

Would he trade? Lend? “Of course,” Marq said warmly.

Their friendship began that way, a bit edgy and cautious at the mar-
gins, but dominated by the skill and secret lore they shared. Three
years of clandestine reading followed before Marq disappeared.

H He wasn’t at any of their usual
meeting places. After all this time,
they still did not know where he
lived, or where his hoard of books
might be. Marq was secretive. They
searched the sprawling corridors of
the complexes, but were afraid to ask
the Voice for any info on him.

The Majority Games were on
then so the streets were more
crowded than usual. Most people
were out all the time, excited and
eager and happy to be in the great mobs that thronged the squares.
The Games took up everybody’s time — except, of course, the three
horn's of work eveiyone had to put in, no exceptions, every labor-
day. Klair and Qent broke up to cover more ground and spent a full
week on the search. Many times Klair blamed herself for not press-
ing Marq about where he lived, but the man was obsessively secre-
tive. “Suppose they grab you, make you tell about me?” he had
always countered.

Now she wondered what the Spectors would do if they uncovered
a lode of books like Marq’s. Send him to Advanced TVeatment? Or
was there something even worse?

She came home after a day of dogged searching and Qent was
not there. He did not appear that evening. When she awoke the
next morning she burst into tears. He was gone that day and the
one after.

On her way back from work, a routine counseling job, she
resolved to go to the Spector. She halfheartedly watched the
crowds, hoping to see Marq or Qent, and that was how she noticed
that three men and a woman were moving parallel to her as she
crossed the Plaza of Promise. They were all looking some other
way but they formed four points of the compass around her with
practiced precision.

She walked faster and they did too. They looked stem and remorse-
less and she could not lose them in the warrens of streets and corri-

read. But as the Voice got easier
touting only the Voice.

dors near the two-room apartment she shared with Qent. They had
waited five years to get one with a tiny balcony. Even then it was just
two levels up from the muddy floor of the air shaft. But if you hooked
your head over to the side you could see some sky that way.

Klair kept moving in an aimless pattern and they followed. Of
course she did not want to go to the apartment, where she would
be trapped. But she was tired and she could not think of anything
else to do.

They knocked a few minutes after she collapsed on the bed.
She had hoped they might hold off for a while. She was resigned.
When she spun the door open the person she least expected to
see was Marq.

“You won’t believe what’s going on,” he said, brushing past her.

“What? Where have you — ”

“The Meritocrats want us.”

“For what?”

“Reading!”

“But the Voice — ”

“Keeps people out of touch and happy. Great idea — but it turns
out you can’t run everything with just the Voice.” He blinked, the
merest hesitation. “Somebody’s got to be able to access info at a
higher level. That was our gut feeling, remember — that reading
was different.”

“Well, yes, but the Spectors — "

“They keep people damped down, is all.” A slight pause. “Anybody
who’s got the savvy to see the signs, the grit to learn to piece together
words on their own, to process it all — those are the people the Mer-
its want. Us!”

Klair blinked. This was too much to encompass. “But why did they
take you away, and Qent — ”

“Had to be sure.” He gave his old familiar shrug. “Wanted to test our
skills, make sure we weren’t just posing. People might catch on, only
pretend to read, y’know?”

“I . . . see.” There was something about Marq that wasn’t right. He
had never had these pauses before . . . because he wasn’t listening to
the Voice then?

She backed away from him. “That’s marvelous news. When will
Qent be back?”

“Oh, soon, soon.” He advanced and she backed out onto the
balcony.

“So what job will you do? I mean, with reading in it?"

They were outside. She backed into the railing. The usual distant
clatter and chat of the air shaft gave her a momentary sense of secu-
rity. Nothing could happen here, could it?

“Oh, plenty. Looking up old stuff, comparing, y’know.” He waved
his hands vaguely.

It wasn’t much of a drop from here. Over the railing, legs set
right ...

“It’s good work, really.”

Could she could get away if she jumped? Marq wasn’t the athletic
type and she knew that if she landed right on the mud below she
wouldn’t twist an ankle or anything. She had on sensible shoes. She
could elude him. If she landed right.

She gave him a quick, searching look. Had he come here alone?
No, probably there were Spectors outside her door, just waiting for
him to talk her into surrendering. Stall for time, yes.

“How bad is it?”

He grinned. “You won’t mind. They just access that part of your

mind for three hours a day. Then they install a shutdown on that cere-
bral sector.”

“Shutdown? I — ”

“So you don’t need to read any more. Just during work, is all. You
get all you need that way. Then you’re free!”

She thought it through. Jump, get away. Couldn’t use the Voice for
help because they could undoubtedly track her if she had her receiver
on. Could she get by just reading the old signs?

Suppose she could. Then what? Find some friends she could trust.
Stay underground? How? Living off what?

“It’s much better. Qent will be back soon and — ”

“Hold it. Don’t move.”

She looked down the air shaft. Was the jump worth it?

YOU SPOOL OUT OF THE ILLUSION AND SNAP — BACK INTO THE TIGHT
cocoon. The automatic sensory leads retract, giving your skin
momentary pinprick goodbye kisses. Once more you feel the cool
clasping surfaces of the cocoon. Now you turn and ask, “Hey, where’s
the rest?”

Myrph shrugs her shoulders, still busy undoing her leads. “That’s
all there was, I told you.”

“Maybe it’s just damaged?”

“No, that’s the end of the cube. There must be another cube to fin-
ish the story, but this was the only one I found back in that closet”
“But how does it end? What’s she do?” You lean toward her, hop-
ing maybe she’s just teasing.

“I dunno. What would you do? Jump?"

You blink, not ready for the question. “Uh, this reading thing. What
is it, really?”

Myrph frowns. “It felt like a kind of your own silent voice inside
your head.”

“Is it real? I mean, does reading exist?”

“Never heard of it.”

“So this isn’t an historical at all, right? It’s a fantasy.”

“Must be. I’ve never seen those tilings on walls."

“Signs, she called them.” You think back. “They would have worn
away a long time ago, anyway.”

“I guess. Felt kinda strange, didn’t it, being able to find out things
without the Voice?"

You bite your lip, thinking. Already the illusion of being that woman
is slipping away, hard to fix in memory. She did have a kind of power
all on her own with that reading thing. You liked that. “I wonder what
she did?”

“Hey, it’s just a story.”

“What would you do?”

“I don’t have to decide. It’s just a story.”

“But why tell it then?”

Myrph says irritably, “It’s just an old illusion, missing a cube.”
“Maybe there was only one.”

“Look, I want illusions to take me away, not stress me out.”

You remember the power of it. “Can I have it, then?”

“The cube? Sure.”

Myrph tosses it over. It is curiously heavy, translucent and
chipped with rounded comers. You cup it in your hand and like the
weight of it.

That is how it starts. You know already that you will go and look
for the signs in the corridors and that for good or ill something new
has come into your world and will now never leave it □

Evan Borik thought that he had escaped from the prison
planet of his birth. He was about to learn that the universe
held more than one type of prison.

BY MARK W. TIEDEMANN
Illustration by Luis Royo

Tacitus,

S PACE AND THE DESERT ARE DIFFER-
ent, but the same. Clean and
empty until you give them third,
fourth, or fifth glances. Until you
give them your attention. Then
you see the details, the clutter, the
essential eruptions of variation
that inform both environments
with texture and memorable qual-
ities. All deserts are different.

Evan Borik stares out at the desert, thinking about
this and how much he wants to be elsewhere. He never
wanted to come back, his whole life has been spent
leaving Petersgate, but here lie is, brought back to answer questions
to which he himself does not want to know the answers. The stippled
variety of the great Petersgate Desert spreads out to the horizon
beneath a thin, indecisive blue sky. The clouds are feathery
brush strokes, clear sign of the ongoing ecologic adaptation project.
The ground is grey and beige, detailed like an ancient painting by
Seurat, with stones, patches of lichenite, algal analogues, a kind of
sporating fungus that resembles coprolites; cracks, holes, small
ravines, fissures, extrusions of basaltic rock, drifting dunes that look
like huge, headless serpents slithering over the landscape. Dragons,
Evan thinks. He’s seen dragons, though never here. Petersgate is a
largely empty world, emptier now in the aftermath of all the killing.

He glances involuntarily at the Armada marine transports that hud-
dle off to the left of the other vehicles that form a rough crescent.
Grey uniforms lounge against their machines, weapons held with
deceptive carelessness. It is easy to believe in their power, especially
76

after what they did to all the townships. The rebellion is over, the
riots are past. The Armada stopped the fighting. They left little stand-
ing. There’s nothing to guard against anymore — not out in the desert
anyway — but they are here all the same. Nothing now happens on
Petersgate without military involvement
He looks away, along the array of carriers. They face the blunt
entrance tunnel to the prison. The low dome rises up forming a wall
against the sky. It is one hundred kilometers in diameter, one hundred
fifty meters high at the center, a drab milky-blue, smeared by drifts
of sand. You could almost mistake it for a natural formation, a vol-
canic blister on the skin of the planet, but for the seventy meter long
entrance tunnel. Evan tries not to look at it, but its presence is insis-
tent, enormous and unavoidable. Terminal City.

A small group of people cluster around a tripod-mounted machine
at the foot of the thirty-meter tall doors. Since the rebellion the prison
has been sealed, the normal accesses useless. Evan hopes it contin-
ues to resist their prying, but knows this is unlikely. These are
Corovais, the people who built the damn thing under contract to
begin with, brought in now by the Armada and the Forum to do
exactly this — break into their own prison.

“Devil’s Island.”

Evan looks over at the young girl, Teryl Corovais. They are alone on
the transport platform. She leans on the railing, staring at the prison.
She looks much like the rest of her family: long, braided copper hair,
slender body, high cheekbones in a face made sad by large hazel eyes.

He has noticed, though, that she avoids the others whenever pos-
sible, keeping to herself or talking to the marines.

“Pardon, Co Corovais?" Evan says.

“Devil’s Island. It was sixteen kilometers from the mainland, thou-
sands from the state that used it as a prison. Many of the ones Broca’s
theories said were incorrigible were sent there, the ones nineteenth
century science said were innately criminal. Still wasn’t far enough
away. It disturbed people. Eventually it was shut down and became
a resort for wealthy tourists.” She looks at him. “Do you think you
didn’t build it far enough away? I mean, five hundred kilometers from
Paxton — it’s a considerable distance now, but in three or four more
generations your growth rate would carry settlements out this far.”
“The plan was to settle in the opposite direction.”

“Then it might have taken two centuries before urban encroach-
ment absorbed it?”

“We thought four.”

She frowns thoughtfully. “Then what?”

Evan only shakes his head. He is grateful when she shrugs and
turns her attention back to the prison. Suddenly, though, she faces
him and says, “My questions irritate you.”

“In truth, everything irritates me. I don’t really want to be here."

“I haven’t been given a good explanation yet”

“Of what?”

“Your rebellion.”

“Not my rebellion. I left.”

“Semantics. The Petersgate Rebellion, then.”

“What’s to explain. We disagreed with each other. Violently.”

“Over what?”

Evan points. “That”

She looks at the dome. “But — ”

“Please excuse me," Evan says, standing. He goes to the ramp and
walks quickly down to the ground and toward the group at the doom.
He notices a couple of marines watch him, their hands shifting slightly
on their rifles. Evan feels a laugh coming on. To them, every Peters-
gater is a terrorist, no one on the planet, native-born, can be trusted.
But they’ve been told to trust him, so there’s a basic conflict for them
to cope with. He suppresses the laugh and tries to ignore them.

Five people stand around the platform. Two are Armada officers:
Major Mabros and his aide. The others are Corovais, one by employ,
their head of security.

Old Dieter scowls alternately at the doors, the machine, the two
Armada officers, and now at Evan.

Ren Corovais operates the platform. Her fingertips press against
the interface panel. Her head drifts from side to side, almost lolling,
78

eyelids fluttering. She is deep in the flow, connected directly to the
prison datasphere, at least what is left of it. Sometimes she seems
about to fall, but always recovers her balance. Evan sees the same
lines in her face as in Teryl, less so in Old Dieter.

“Try sublevel three,” Old Dieter says. “Or let me try.”

Ren’s eyes focus briefly and she looks at Old Dieter. “When I run
out of options I’ll let you know.”

Old Dieter glares, then shrugs. “Just trying to be useful.”

Ren lets herself sink back into the flow. Evan unconsciously rubs
his own fingertips together. He has no caps, no link, no way to do
what Ren is doing. He has always wanted an interface — it was one
reason he left Petersgate — but they are expensive and limited. Only
a few Petersgaters ever had them, most of them diplomats who reg-
ularly travelled off world. For everyone else they were illegal.

Old Dieter looks at Evan. “You changed things,” he says. “This
should have been done an hour ago. You added routines.”

“Not me,” Evan says. “I haven’t been here in five years."

“Your people. Same difference.” Old Dieter snorts in disgust. “We
built you a perfectly good prison, there was no need to meddle with it.”
Before Evan can answer the air is filled with a grinding thunder. He
looks up in time to see the doors begin to part, slide back in tracks.
He can feel it through his feet. Sand drifts down like snow from at op
the entrance arch; the seam empties itself and widens. Finally the
doors stop, the noise stops.

T he sunlight reflected off the near-white
sand pushes into the tunnel, but fails to reach
the far end. Near the opening the overarcliing
ribwork is visible and between each support
runs a length of walkway. Down the very cen-
ter is a trough two meters wide and fifteen
deep. About ten meters in, a mesh gate blocks
entiy to the trough. Stairs lead up from the stag-
ing area to the walkways.

Major Mabros gives a signal. Two troop trans-
ports move into the staging area and marines
spill out of them and up the stairs. The tinny
sounds of their boots echo out of the tunnel. Evan waits for the sharp
sound of energy pulse weapons, but after a few minutes he knows
that Ren Corovais has disarmed the automated security as well.
Major Mabros’s aide listens to his comm and finally nods.

“All clear,” M^jor Mabros says.

More marines move into the tunnel. Ren Corovais pulls out of the
link, rubs her eyes, and gives quick, whispered instructions to her
security man, who nods and walks away, talking into his own comm.
Suddenly transports are moving, people scunying about. Evan looks
around, momentarily excited by the pmpose implicit in all the motion.

Ren closes the lid on her panel and retracts the legs. She slings the
strap over her shoulder and gazes into the tunnel. She smiles wanly,
looking very tired.

“Some interesting wrinkles,” she says. “It’s ajumbled mess, though.
I don’t understand why you found it necessaiy to program it to crash
itself. For that matter, I don’t see why you found it necessary to change
it at all. The original security program was more than adequate.”

“I had nothing to do with the decision,” Evan says defensively.

“Of course.” She shrugs. “At least there was enough left to work with.”
“No lights?” Major Mabros asks, scowling.

“Getting the doors open was difficult enough from a remote,”
Ren says.

Major Mabros nods curtly, then turns to speak to his aide in clipped
milcode syllables. Evan gazes up into the cavernous mouth, a clammy
knot in his chest

“Let’s see what else you changed,” Ren Corovais says and walks on
toward the entrance before he can reply. Resentful, he follows at a
discreet distance.

Lamp beams dance over the surfaces within, cut through the dust
all the boots have stirred into the air. At the end of the tunnel, stairs
lead up from the walkways above the trough to wide doors.
Another Corovais is working on the locking mechanism on the

northern door. Evan looks across the trough to the southern side,
which is a mirror-image of this one, and sees marines setting up
halogens along the walkway.

“There.”

The door slides open with a sound like fabric on skin. Three
marines, helmet lamps on, duck through, weapons ready. Evan wants
to laugh. It seems they have shot up everything else on Petersgate and
now they’re looking for more. A few moments later one of them
comes back and announces all clear in a quiet voice.

In the profusion of lamps, Evan sees the room as an assembly of
brief pictures — wall of monitors, a long console, chairs at separate
stations, a weapons locker, a bulletin board. Ren and the other
Corovais bend over the console, studying it. She finds an interface
panel and presses fingertips to its dark surface. She shakes her head,
scowling, and continues searching. One of the others flips a series of
switches, but nothing happens.

“Dead,” someone says.

Ren looks around, finds Evan. “Well?”

“Well what?” he snaps back. He notices Mqjor Mabros give him a
disapproving look. “I’ve never been here before, Co Corovais.”

“You were Paxton’s city warden,” Ren says.

“My office was in Paxton, not here. When I left Petersgate, Vol
Massin was warden here. I have no way of knowing — ”

“You were in charge of shipping prisoners here,” Major Mabros says,
loudly. His troops look at him, surprised, and for a moment he is bathed
in lamp light. “You mean to say your duties never entailed a visit?”

“No, they never did. I know it’s hard for you to believe, Mqjor, but
I left Petersgate because I did not approve of this place. I had no
desire to come see it and my duties never made it necessary. I was
only city warden for a year.”

“If you didn’t approve, why did you hold the post for so long?”
Ren asked.

“It was necessary in order to qualify for a position elsewhere.”

Mqjor Mabros grunted. “All right, we need light in here. Sergeant—”

Evan watches the marines and the Corovais move from task to
task and leans against the wall, his arms tightly folded over his chest.
He wishes they would stop asking him questions. He has long since
stopped volunteering information. Either they find it irrelevant or
they don’t believe him. He is not part of this, not anymore. It is diffi-
cult to explain to people how Petersgate had become a burden to
itself, how the urgency for perfection had transformed every action
of every day into a demonstration of loyalty. They were suffocating
under their ideals, unable to reach the free air because this place,
this prison, chained them to their own brutality. Evan thinks about
all this, and again knows that he was right to try to leave. The pris-
oners who went into this facility would never conform to society, but
Petersgate had conformed to the prison. So Evan had felt, he and
many others. Many who openly dissented and ended up here. The
duty of every prisoner is to try to escape and Evan had done that. He
hadn’t wanted to come back to Petersgate, ever, but he admits to a
perverse curiosity that made the demand easier to accept Revolution
has taken his home. What is that like? What will it accomplish?

“Mare Tranquilitatus.”

Evan jerks aside at the voice, so close. Teryl Corovais stands just
inside the doorway, hands clasped behind her.

“What?”

“Mare Tranquilitatus. The first facility off Earth. I thought it was
peculiar that they placed it in the Sea of Tranquility. But then I found
out that when the American penitentiary system was first estab-
lished many of them were modeled on Auburn and Cherry Hill. They
practiced Quietism, the idea that prisoners must be kept quiet so
that the social influences that initially caused them to be antisocial
would vanish. Cherry Hill kept each prisoner completely isolated
from all the rest. Perpetual solitary confinement. Prisons were veiy
still, very quiet, tranquil. The historian Tocqueville toured some of
them. He was very impressed. He said, ‘We have often trod during
night those monotonous and dim galleries, where a lamp is always
burning: we felt as if we traversed catacombs; there were a thou-
sand living beings, and yet it was a desert solitude.’ Nice. I imagine

no one said anything so eloquent about this place, did they?”

he Corovais have finally begun to ignore
him. He has no answers for them now, they are
deep into trying to restart the internal systems.
He wanders out onto the walkway and stares
down the length of the admission trough.

There is no trace of the prison guard com-
pliment. They were never really needed, Evan
never understood why the post existed, but
when he left there was a staff of twenty-five.
Transports are missing from the motor pool.
Clearly they left at the first opportunity to
abandon the facility. Evan sympathizes. He
cannot imagine working here, day on day.

Major Mabros and Ren Corovais come out onto the walkway.

“Co Corovais,” Major Mabros says, “how is this set up? What's the
funct ion of this design?”

“The prisoner,” she explains, “is taken out of the transport back
there at t he staging area and sent through that inner gate. At the other
end, down here, is the processing center. Fully automated. In the
unlikely event a prisoner scales these walls, there are several e.p.
emplacements to knock them back down. In the processing center,
scans are made, new clothing issued, final instructions given, and a
third door opens to the release chamber, which encircles the inte-
rior. The prisoner can exit the ring at any point.”

“What if they don’t exit?”

“You mean if they tiy to stay inside the ring? There’s a flushing sys-
tem, herds them along from section to section.”

“Mmm. And how did one gain release?”

There is silence for a time and finally Evan looks at them. Ren and
Major Mabros are looking at him, waiting for an answer.

“One didn’t,” he says. “This is the Petersgate Center for Social Irre-
mediacy. No one ever gained release from here. Sentence here was
sentence for life, no reprieve. Even if we’d wanted to, there was no
way to get someone out.”

“Is that where the nickname came from?” Major Mabros asks.
“This is Terminal City.”

“Is that how you designed it, Co Corovais?”

“No. Our design incorporated release mechanisms.”

“So where are they?”

Ren shakes her head. “They’ve been removed.”

“Charon,” Teiyl says, “housed two dozen people who were con-
sidered irremediable, dangers not only to society at large but also to
the general prison population. They’d been transferred from maxi-
mum security facilities all over the Sol System. Tranquilitatus, Noc-
tis Labyrinthus, Enceladus, Miranda, Hermes Darkside . . . two dozen
people who couldn’t be near anybody. Charon returned to the rale of
silence from two and a half centuries earlier. No one knows if Charon
was ever closed down. I couldn’t find that out. Who did you put in
here, Co Borik?”

“You don’t know? I’m amazed. I wouldn’t think that would be so dif-
ficult to find out.”

“Someone trashed your penal datasphere before the final Armada
assault.”

Evan is startled.

“Hm,” Major Mabros grants. “Interesting.”

Halogens cast almost shadowless illumination in the control
center. The monitors are all dead, though, and nothing responds on
the consoles. One of the Corovais is lying on his back, peering up
into tire guts of one of the stations, scowling. Beside him is a power-
pack he is trying to connect to the system.

“I’m not sure I see the point,” Evan says to no one in particular.
One of the marines glances at him. A Corovais looks up. No one
responds, so he shrugs.

“There’s no power to anything,” tire Corovais stretched on tire floor
complains. He makes another connection from the powerpack and
suddenly sections of the console flicker.

“There were only seven prisoners,” Teiyl says, “in the Bastille, in
Paris, when the mob stormed it”

Major Mabros looks at her, frowning. “Then why did they storm it?”
Teryl shrugs and looks at Evan. He feels himself flush with anger.
“Why ask me?”

“Seems like an interesting parallel.”

“1 wasn’t here. I left.”

“You were here when they built it.”

“I was fifteen when they built it.”

“You became city warden — ”

“I told you, to get a position elsewhere.” He glares at her, then at
Major Mabros. “You’re military. Don’t you people have steps you have
to take to get from one position to another, go up the ranks?” When
Major Mabros looks away, Evan turns to Teiyl. “I disapproved. I left
Petersgate. You’ve dragged me here to explain things to you that I
can’t explain.”

“You said the rebellion happened over this place,” she says evenly.
“It was one factor.”

“Social irremediacy ..." Major Mabros muses. “What exactly does
that mean?”

“Just what it says. No remedy. Incompatible. Incorrigible.” Evan
blows out a lungful of air, suddenly angry. “Petersgate wanted to do
away with crime, Major. When it was founded they tried to order it in
such a way that everyone would be incorporated into society usefully.
Everyone would have a purpose in life, there would be work,
resources, everything one could want or need, nothing to cause tire
kinds of social envy we believed caused antisocial behavior in tire past.
Perfect. Hospices would treat anyone with adjustment problems.”
“Very utopian,” Major Mabros says dryly.

“You mean naive. I agree. But that was fifty-eight years ago and a
lot of the founders are dead — maybe all of them now. There’s no
way to know how many of them really believed it could be done. All
I know r is that when it turned out that it couldn’t, Petersgate built
prisons, just like everywhere else. It’s all a question of tolerance,
isn’t it? Then, when I was a boy, they built this place.” He grunts.
“Oh, they must have been angry. Bitterly angiy. In spite of the best
intentions of the founders and eveiybody else, Petersgate had crim-
inals. Just like everybody else. They must have been deeply disap-
pointed. Didn’t these people realize? Didn’t they appreciate the
work and good will expressed by the Petersgate ideal? What was
wrong with them? Couldn’t they see that they had it better here than
anywhere else?”

“Evidently not,” Major Mabros says.

“Evidently. But we’re reasonable people here, we believe that noth-
ing happens without cause. So there must be an answer. There had
to be something we could point to that would explain.” Evan stares
at his fists, knuckles w'hite, resting on his knees. “In the meantime
something has to be done. They have to be gotten out of society. The
ones who had been in other facilities, been through rehabilitation,
and still failed to live up to the Petersgate ideal. Their failure was our
failure, but we never questioned our part in it. The ideal was the
important thing. We couldn’t risk the ideal. So we commissioned the
Corovais to build this facility."

“We didn’t build this, though,” Ren Corovais points out. “You
altered what we built.”

Evan looks up at her. He sees then that everyone is looking at him,
listening. “I keep telling you I didn’t — ”

Teiyl touches his arm lightly and he stops. She shakes her head.
“You kept saying ‘we’, Co Borik.”

Evan leans his head back against the wall. “Yes. Well, maybe there’s
something to it after all.” He looks at Ren Corovais, who frowns back
at him. “You built us the best prison you could, Co Corovais. All we
did — in our own humble way — was perfect it. We never thought
we were imprisoning ourselves.”

Old Dieter shakes his head, scowling, while the technicians
give their reports. Evan stops list ening half way through. Everything
is fused, melt ed down. They will have to bring in all new equipment,
tear everything out, and t ry to rebuild from scratch. There is no guar-
80

antee, though, that the embedded systems inside the prison area will
work. Evan thinks it likely that everything is ruined.

H e steps out of the control room and
looks down the length of the tunnel. It’s
night and the entrance is dark. For an
instant Evan imagines that the doors
have rolled shut and they are all trapped.
He starts down the walkway toward the
arch, expecting to be stopped by a
marine. But he reaches the end unchal-
lenged and stops at the stairs and looks
back toward the pools of halogens. The
bright lights cast overlapping clouds, like
an explosion caught midway and frozen.
Cool desert air tousles his hair. He descends the stairs and walks
out into the night.

Immediately he feels better, lighter, and his stride lengthens. Trans-
ports form enclaves of their own, camp lights glowing among them.
Evan hears voices, hushed, intimate; laughter bursts out loudly once,
startling him, but no one calls to him, no one seems to notice. He
keeps walking, suddenly energetic, anxious the way he remembers
as a child when he stole something and was on his way to an escape,
certain any moment that someone would catch him, hoping that he
could reach the safety of “outside” where he could disappear into a
crowd or make Ms way to a place no one would think to search. Heart
hammering, he feels now like that boy, on the verge of freedom, a
prize hidden within Ms shirt or jacket, a private knowledge that he
had gotten away, beaten their scrutiny, defied the rules.

He passes file unmarked boundary tire Armada veMcles imply by their
positions and feels himself grin in delight He picks up Ms pace, breaks
into a trot, and puts more distance between himself and the prison.

He tops a rise and the ground slopes gently down. He crouches and
looks back. The encampment is two hundred meters away now. Tire
prison itself is a vast shelf slicing off tire stars at tire horizon, the oMy
relief in its surface the dim outline of the access tunnel. In the oppo-
site direction the desert is a pale fog, silvered beneath the Milky Way
that crosses tire sky almost directly above. Petersgate has no moon,
oMy tire stations orbiting beyond tire ring of satellites. If he fries, Evan
can pick them out, even against the crowded background of suns.

A sharp, breathy sneeze breaks the stillness and Evan drops to the
ground. He lies still, wislring Iris heart would slow down, and stares. Off
to his left he sees a smudge against tire sand, but he waits till it moves.
Another sneeze and tire smudge shifts position. Evan crawls forward.

“Damn,” someone says and sneezes again. Evan recognizes the
voice — Teiyl Corovais — and pushes hinrself back to Ms feet.

“Histamine triggers,” he says and she jumps to her feet. Evan feels
guilty. “Allergic reaction. There’s a lot of plant life out here. It only
looks empty.”

“Co Borik ...”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you ...”

She sits back down and says nothing. A low hum stops then, caus-
ing Evan to notice it for tire first time, only by its sudden absence.

“No one’s alive in there,” she says. “Are they?” When Evan doesn’t
answer, she continues. “Ren found a security net a little wlrile ago.
Automatic response, set to activate in case of a breech from inside.
It was military, Major Mabros recognized it, used primarily for secur-
ing perimeters of highly sensitive facilities. Tire kind of places peo-
ple feel it better to destroy than to let be discovered by — well, by
anyone else. Clever. In the event of any attempt to escape, the entire
prison population would be killed. The trouble is, we can’t tell what
was set to go off. Biologicals? Fissionables? Aerobic inhibitors? Tire
most efficient would be a neutron burst Short-lived, fairly clean, min-
imum destruction to the actual facility. Of course, it would be very
difficult to shield against that. I mean, detection would be easier than
with, say, toxins. Makes things hard. We don’t know whether to open
it up or leave it shut. What would you suggest?"

“I would leave it shut”

“Mm. Of course.”

Evan hears the hum again and looks back toward the prison. Teryl
sneezes. Evan sees a dim light in her hand for a moment, then it is gone.

“Dieter says we’re blameless. He says all we do is build the facili-
ties. How they’re used or misused is no concern of ours. He’s not very
convincing, though. He’s really upset about this.” In the darkness
Evan sees her hold up her fist and turn it over slowly, studying it. He
can’t tell if she is holding anything or not, nor can he see her face.
“Histamine trigger,” she says. “That’s clever.”

Evan shivers. Now that he’s not moving, not compelled by forgot-
ten ambitions, he feels the cold air, thin and asperic. He glances back
over his shoulder, but cannot see the prison over the hump of sand
behind them.

“We should go back,” he says.

“We can’t,” she whispers.

“What?”

Teryl’s head moves and Evan imagines she is shaking it. Suddenly
she looks at him.

“Do you believe in free will?”

“What?”

“Do you believe you can determine your own future?”

“Well ... not exactly, no, but we can make choices.”

“Close enough. If you could do anything, what would it be? Any
choice.”

“I — ’’ Evan coughs. “No one ever asked before."

“I’m asking. I’m curious.”

“Well ... I always wanted to be linked. I hoped one day to get
implants to enter the flow. Like yours.”

She’s quiet for a time. Evan is about to suggest they return when
she says, “Have you tried?”

“No. It’s expensive. It was illegal here. That’s one reason I left. But
I haven’t saved enough yet.”

“Don’t. You can’t. They have to be installed when you’re a child, so
you can grow into it. Adult amendations don’t work right.” She
laughs. “Youth is destiny.”

VAN WANTS TO LEAVE, BUT INERTIA KEEPS
him in place, waiting for her to move first or
send him away. Teryl disturbs him — all the
Corovais do, but Teryl most of all —
because she fits no easy category of age
and experience for him. She seems to know
so much and yet it strikes him that she does
nothing with it In fact, she tries to avoid
doing anything, as if she wants nothing to
do with anything around her. A waste, he
thinks. He tells himself it is because of the
link, that access to that much information,
that much wisdom — he flunks of it as wisdom, all that combined
advice and observation and, he imagines, truth — distorts the normal
progress of maturity. He thinks perhaps she is lying about the
implants, at the same time he knows she is not.

“What else?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Eveiything else depended on my leaving Petersgate.”
“Did you think being here prevented you from having dreams?”
Evan mbs his hands together nervously. He feels angry again. He
resents her, resents the questions, resents even more the absence of
answers. He sighs heavily, the air whistling from his nose. His lungs
are laboring. It’s time to go back, he thinks, but still he sits, resenting
the night and the girl beside him.

“They built that,” he says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “and the
whole planet became a prison.” He hangs his head, startled at the
words, troubled by how correct they sound. But he had felt it all his life,
the growing brutality from a response to something all Petersgate had
wanted to deny. They were obsessed with the problem and everything
turned in one way or another to concentrate on it, to finding an answer,
and the only answer they could find was to throw away freedom.

“So you escaped,” Teryl says. “Makes sense. Except
“Except?”

“Well ... you made it so you couldn’t escape.” She stands, shakily,

and for a few seconds Evan expects her to fall. “Prisons are personal.

I know, my family builds them.” She sighs. “You want implants ...
here. You can have mine.” She leans over him and drops something
into his lap, then staggers up the slope and disappears over the crest.

Evan stares down at the sand between his legs at the small dark
lumps. He picks one up. It’s soft, pliant. A finger.

He sucks ah' through his mouth, pushing himself back from the pile.
Among the stubs is a longer object and he picks it up. A surgical laser,
a scalpel. Pulse throbbing, he scoops it all up and runs over the rise.

“Wait!” he calls and sprints toward the shadows and the pale lights.
He cannot see her. His lungs heave and he feels lightheaded, dizzy,
but he runs on.

At the perimeter a shadow steps in front of him. fie tries to dodge it,
but something hits his chest and he feels himself spin around, feels the
ground slap him, hard, feels the world whip through his brain, feels his
thoughts scatter across the sand along with the fingers and the laser.

“Damn it, what did you do!”

“Nothing,” he says. Then he feels the first kick in his side and he
says no more.

He sits in the mobile infirmary, unable to find a position in
which his ribs do not ache. Dawn smears the horizon. The doois are
open to the desert, for which he is grateful.

Across from him, Teryl lies in a medical cocoon. Her hand is
swathed in biogel, but she is in shock and slightly delirious. At times
she recites statistics about other prisons, then lapses back into
unconsciousness.

Old Dieter climbs into the van and stares at her for a time. Then he
shrugs and looks at Evan.

“Fourth time,” he says. “Can’t figure it out."

“No?"

“No.”

“Have you asked her?”

“Often."

“What does she say?”

Old Dieter scowls. “We pierced the inner wall with a probe. So far we
haven’t found anything. It looks like we can open it up and clean it out.”

For a moment Evan is confused.

“You should’ve left it alone,” Old Dieter continues. “It was a per-
fectly good facility when we built it. You should have left it alone."

“I agree.”

“Then — ” Old Dieter closes his mouth.

“You’re going to put me in there, aren’t you?” Evan asks. “With the
others who escaped.”

“You said no one ever escaped.”

“So I did.”

Old Dieter stares at him, then grunts and leaves.

“ . . . Soviet gulags held the insane ...”

Evan stares at Teiyl.

“ ... insanity was any desire to be free ... the desire to leave the
gulag demonstrated insanity . . . the only thing to do to escape was to
want to stay in prison . . . and they'd let you do that . . . you were where
you wanted to be ... so you were free ...”

She swallows loudly and Evan sees the whites of her eyes. The
machine is growing new fingers. Later the implant caps will be rein-
serted. He envies her. Prisons are all the same, he flunks, until you
give then third, fourth, or fifth glances. Until you give them your atten-
tion. Then you see details, the clutter, the essential eruptions of vari-
ation that inform the environments with texture and memorable qual-
ities. All prisons are different.

He feels like a child who has just comprehended a secret, learned
something occult, discovered a truth about adults, and thinks he will
find power in the knowledge. He stares out the door of the van at the
desert and thinks about this and how much he wants and how much
he will never have.

“If we must die, we can at least be sure the guilty will be
punished.”

Tacitus, The Annals □

The

Firefly

TREE

BY JACK WILLIAMSON
Illustration by Laurie Harden

The tree tickled the sky,
sizzled with a strange new
life, and told him that there
was a place where tilings
could be better.

T hey had come

back to live on the
old farm where his
grandfather was
born. His father
loved it, but he
felt lonely for his
friends in the city.
Cattle sometimes grazed through the
barren sandhills beyond the barbed
wire fences, but there were no neigh-
bors. He found no friends except the
firefly tree.

It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather
had planted below the house. His mouth
watered for the ripe apples and peaches and
pears he expected, but when he saw the trees
they were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.

With no friends at all, he stayed with his father
on the farm when his mother drove away every
morning to work at the peanut mill. His father
was always busy in the garden he made among
the bare frees in the orchard. The old windmill
had lost its wheel, but there was an electric
pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines
grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of

tomatoes and beans, and then the com that
grew tall enough to hide the money trees.

His mother fretted that they might cause trou-
ble. Once he heard her call them marijuana. His
father quickly hushed her. The word was
strange to him but he never asked what it meant
because he saw his father didn’t like it.

He found the firefly tree one day while his
father was chopping weeds and moving the
pipes that sprayed water on his money frees. It
was still tiny then, not as tall as his laiee. The
leaves were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy
black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely
flower had three wide sky-colored petals and a
bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the
ground by it, breathing its strange sweetness, till
his father came by with the hoe.

“Don’t hurt it!” he begged. “Please!”

“That stinking weed?” his father grunted. “Get
out of the way.”

Something made him reach to catch the hoe.

“Okay.” His father grinned and let it stay. “If
you care that much.”

He called it his tree, and watched it grow'.
When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found
a bucket and carried water from the well. It
grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the
great blue flowers and then a hundred. The odor
of them filled the garden.

Since there was no school, his mother tried
to teach him at home. She found a red-backed
reader for him, and a workbook with pages for
him to fill out while she was away at work. He
seldom got the lessons done.

“He’s always mooning over that damn weed,”
hie father muttered when she scolded him.
“High as a kite on the stink of it.”

The odor was strange and strong, but no stink
at all. Not to him. He loved it and loved the tree.
He carried more water and used the hoe to till
the soil around it. Often he stood just looking at
the huge blue blooms, wondering what the fruit
would be.

One night he dreamed that the tree was
swarming with fireflies. They were so real that
he got out of bed and slipped out into the dark.
The stars blazed brighter here than they had

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ever been in the city. They lit his way to the
orchard, and he heard the fireflies before he
came to the tree.

Their buzz rose and fell like the sound of
the surf the time they went to visit his aunt
who lived by the sea. Twinkling brighter than
the stars, they filled the branches. One of
them came to meet him. It hovered in front
of his face and lit on the tip of his trembling
finger, smiling at ium with eyes as blue and
bright as the flowers.

He had never seen a firefly close up. It was
as big as a bumblebee. It had tiny hands that
gripped his fingernail, and one blue eye
squinted a little to study his face. The light
came from a round topknot on its head. It
flickered like something electric, from red to
green, yellow to blue, maybe red again. The
flashes were sometimes slower than his
breath, sometimes so fast they blurred. He
thought the flicker was meant to tell him
something, but he had no way to understand.

Barefoot and finally shivering with cold, he
stood there till the flickering stopped. The fire-
fly shook its crystal wings and flew away. The
stars were fading into the dawn, and the tree
was dark and silent when he looked. He was
back in bed before he heard his mother rat-
tling dishes in the kitchen, making breakfast.

The next night he dreamed that he was
back under the tree, with the firefly perched
again on his finger. Its tiny face seemed
almost human in the dream, and he under-
stood its winking voice. It told him how the
tree had grown from a sharp-pointed acorn
that came from the stars and planted itself
when it struck the ground.

It told him about the firefly planet, far off in
the sky. The fireflies belonged to a great
republic spread across the stars. Thousands
of different peoples lived in peace on thou-
sands of different worlds. The acorn ship had
come to invite the people of Earth to join
their republic. They were ready to teach the
Earth-people how to talk across space and
travel to visit the stars. The dream seemed so
wonderful that he tried to tell about it at
breakfast.

“What did I tell you?" His father turned red
and shouted at his mother. “His brain’s been
addled by the stink of that poison weed. I
ought to cut it down and bum it."

“Don’t!” He was frightened and screaming.

“I love it. I’ll die if you kill it.”

“I’m afraid he would.” His mother made a
sad little frown. "Leave the plant where it is,
and I’ll take him to Dr. Wong.”

“Okay.” His father finally nodded, and
frowned at him sternly. ”If you’ll promise to
do your chores and stay out of the garden.”
Trying to keep the promise, he washed the
dishes after his mother was gone to work. He
made the beds and swept the floors. He tried
to do his lessons, though the stories in the
reader seemed stupid to him now.

He did stay out of the garden, but the fire-
flies came again in his dreams. They carried
him to see the shining forests on their own
wonderful world. They took him to visit the

planets of other peoples, people who that lived
under their seas, people who lived high in their
skies, people as small as ants, people larger
than the elephants he had seen in a circus
parade and queerer than the octopus in the
side show. He saw ships that could fly faster
than light from star to star, and huge machines
he never understood, and cities more magical
than fairyland.

He said no more about the dreams till the
day his mother came home from work to take
him to Dr. Wong. The nurse put a thermome-
ter under his tongue and squeezed his arm
with a rubber gadget and left him to wait with
his mother for Dr. Wong. Dr. Wong was a
friendly man who listened to his chest and
looked at the nurse’s chart and asked him
about the fireflies.

“They’re wonderful!” He thought the doc-
tor would believe him. "You must come at
night to see them, sir. They love us. They
came to show us the way to the stars.”
“Listen to him!” His mother had never been
out at night to see the fireflies shining. “That
ugly weed has driven him out of his head!”
“An interesting case.” The doctor smiled
and patted his shoulder in a friendly way and
turned to speak to his mother. “One for the
books. The boy should see a psychiatrist.”
His mother had no money for that.

“I’ll just take him home,” she said, “and
hope he gets better.”

A police car was parked in front of the
house when they got there. His father sat in
the back, behind a metal grill. His head was
bent. He wouldn’t look up, not even when his
mother called through a half-open window.

The police had more cars parked around
the garden. They had chopped down all the
money trees and thrown them into a pile. The
firefly tree lay on top. It fragrance was lost in
a reek of kerosene. The policemen made
everybody move upwind and set the fire with
a hissing blowtorch.

It spread slowly at first, then blazed so high
they had to move farther away. Feeling sick at
his stomach, he saw the branches of the tree
twist and beat against the flames. He heard a
long sharp scream. A cat caught in the fire,
the policemen said, but he knew it wasn’t a
cat. Fireflies swarmed out of the thrashing
branches and exploded like tiny bombs when
the flames caught them.

His father was ciying when the police took
him away, along with a bundle of the money
trees for evidence. His mother moved them
back to the city. In school again, he tried to
tell his new teachers about the fireflies and
how they had come to invite the Earth into
their great confederation of stars. Tire teach-
ers said he had a great imagination and sent
him to the school psychologist.

The psychologist called his mother to come
for a conference. They wanted him to forget
the fireflies and do his lessons and look up liis
old friends again, but he wanted no friends
except the fireflies. He grieved for them and
grieved for his father and grieved for all that
might have been. □

HOUSE TRAP

Continued from page 69

It never reached orbit around the planet.
Billions of disassemblers had converted all
(he s flip’s mass into a swarm of their own
kind. Then, their job complete, they turned
themselves off.

When Tabitha returned to the house
around the sun, she was only two. Between
the immature body and space legs, she felt
embarrassingly wobbly. But when the Presi-
dent of tire Sphere bent down in all his dig-
nity to pin tire Order of the Galaxy medal on
her, the crowd went wild. Tabitha’s father had
to read her speech for her, because of the
tears in her eyes.

Afterward, her father and grandfather took
her in the Institute’s silver aircar to Mother’s
house. The mechanical sheep had been
replaced by electronic locusts, and there
wasn’t a blade of grass in sight.

“Stay as long as you like,” said her father
after carrying her suitcase to the front door.
“If anyone in history ever deserved a vacation
from a group mind ...” He smiled and kissed
her on the cheek, then turned back toward
the aircar.

She had to jump up to reach the heavy
brass knocker, and for all her effort, it made
only a muffled clunk.

After a minute, the door swung open.
Mother greeted her with a yelp of joy. There
was someone else with her: a second head
grew from the top of her torso. And she had
gene-morphed to a biological sixteen.

“Richard?” said Tabitha. She blinked to
be sure.

“We got married,” said Mother, smiling at
his head beside hers. His mouth twitched
from a wire-ecstasy implant in the center of
his forehead.

“Do you think like a group mind now?”
asked Tabitha.

“Oh, no!” said Mother. “No thinking. But
being a hermaphrodite has other advantages.”
She playfully pinched Richard’s cheek.

There was a whoop from Tabitha’s old
room, and the door dilated. Mother and
Richard’s heads turned in unison.

Four small children rushed through the
opening, and a barrage of gravity-neutralizer
arrows flew through the air toward Tabitha
and Mother.

As the two of them floated toward the ceil-
ing, Mother said, “Aren’t they cute? We cloned
them so you’d have playmates.”

Staring down, Tabitha saw that each child
was a two-year old Richard. They began dis-
assembling her suitcase, looking for presents.

“And we fixed up your room so you can
move right back in. It’s going to be won-
derful!”

Her heart pounding, Tabitha looked out the
window and saw that the aircar hadn’t left
yet; there was still time. She took a deep
breath and consulted her augment. □

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Rock-and-roll will never die— but neither will science fiction.

BELOW: SFs Hugo-winning fan
favorite Michael Whelan took Meat
Loaf Back into Hell for the rover of
his comeback album. RIGHT: Den
creator and Heavy Metal artist
Richard Corben painted the cover
of Meat Loafs debat album, Bat

Out of Hell.

F: the self-styled “literature of ideas.” Rock-and-roll:
music of the body, primitive, hormonal. When you look
at it that way, it’s pretty amazing that SF and rock-and-
roll ever got together in the first place.

Despite its claims to the contrary, SF is a highly conservative
form of literature. Military SF still rules a major portion of the field;
galactic empires and can-do heroes still thrive in the works of Lois
Bujold and David Drake. When aliens aren’t simply insectlike tar-
gets, they tend to be far more human and comprehensible than,
say, your average American politician.

This isn’t hard too understand when you consider that most of the
SF writers I know would be far more likely to curl up on the couch
for aii Ed Wood Jr. film festival than to hurl themselves into a mosh
pit or drop some E and rave all night. Writing is a solitary, inward
directed activity, and music is pretty much the exact opposite.

Still, you can’t make a veiy tasty omelet without breaking a few
rules (or something like that), and when the two forces of rock and
fantasy collide, the results can be explosive.

For me, the explosion stalled with Michael Moorcock. His Jerry
Cornelius novels are full of a rebellious rock-and-roll sensibility, per-
haps nowhere more evident than in the climax of A Cure for Cancel ;
where Jeny reconstructs the universe to the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s
Are You Experienced.

Moorcock is one of the few to work both sides of the rock and SF
intersection. His collaborations with Blue Oyster Cult include the FM
radio staple “Veteran of the Psychic Wars" from Fire of Unknown
Origin . British rockers Hawkwind devoted the entire Warrior on the
Edge of Time album to Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, with Moor-
88

cock himself listed as coauthor of four songs and credited for vocals
on two of them. Even this was not enough; a few of us diehard Moor-
cock fans actually have a copy of a British import called The New
Worlds Fair, by Michael Moorcock and the Deep Fix. Here Moor-
cock not only sings and writes but plays guitar and baitjo as well.

I only know of a handful of other writers who have
actually been working musicians as well. At the top of the list
would have to be John Shirley, who also has the distinction of
an album, Obsession, to his credit. In the introduction to
Shirley’s Scream Press short story collection, Heatseeker, William
Gibson had this to say: “Sometimes, reading Shirley, I can hear the
guitars... This is an effect that fiction about rock, to my knowledge,
has yet to attain; I think Shirley can hit it because his stories are rock,
in some primal way. They well up from the same dark sea of back-
beat and adrenal frenzy.”

Of course for every John Shirley there's an Allen Steele, with his
Deadhead construction workers in space. And let’s not forget that

A-Waifcw’! Gibson’s “Burning

Chrome," Sterling's Artificial Kid. g list of the connections

I couldn't hope to provide an < devoted t0 the
between SF and rock; I ve just hear P Even given

subject on the Internet that runs to some w ^ sffll only

the highly personal Jj™^°S a enced by music. The other side of
h fSomnovelty hits from the’SOs, like Sheb Woole/s “Purple

Spfig ggg=E

KSSS5S»^«^*-“

Pete?’ Lloyd.

Jimi Hendnx is a good P la “ 1 Xuise of liimself as an alien,

musicians. He toyed ftequ^fly^e^e^ ^ ^ In ^

as in (OT

obscure B-side called “ J watchers), Hendrix gives a

STP with LSD, for you dru S. „ vour r jght you will see Sat-
stoned tour of tLTft vou’U°see y Mais. g don't open that door!

agonist abmidons a war-tom future to live underwater.

Pink Floyd has always shown a science-fictional bent, from early
songs such as “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “Astron-
omy Domine,” to solo work by Gilmour and Waters, to new albums
by the current touring band.

SF fans Grace Slick and Paul Kantner jettisoned the Jefferson Air-
plane to start the Jefferson Starship, whose first album, Blows
Against the Empire, advocated interplanetary migration. All too
soon, however, the band opted for chart success instead of idealism.

Yes’s Fragile included a song called “Starship Troopers,” after the
Heinlein novel; in fact, much of Yes’s work, such as Close to the Edge
and Tales of Topographic Oceans, might well prove to be science fic-
tional if anyone could ever understand it.

F antasy and horror fans also got into the act: the
’60s spawned a rock group named after H. P. Lovecraft;
the Turtles, a k a Flo and Eddie, actually performed at a
World Fantasy Convention in Providence in 1986; Con-
crete Blonde’s brilliant Bloodletting album was inspired by the work
of Anne Rice.

Here in the '90s, techno band Mona Lisa Overdrive took their name
from the novel by William Gibson; Donald Fagan, who had played
with SF themes in Steely Dan songs such as “King of the World,” came
out with an SF concept album called Kamakiriad, a tour of the future
in a car which is almost a city unto itself.

All of these artists, and many more, were influenced by science fic-
tion and fantasy prose. They are a small minority next to the rockers
who have been influenced by SF film. The Ringo Starr album cover
parodying The Day The Earth Stood Still, the B-movie influences in
such songs as “Planet Claire” by the B-52s, David Bowie’s “Space
Oddity” all come to mind.

With the advent of the video age, SF images have proliferated: from
Tom Petty’s postapocalyptic “You Got Lucky” to Michael Jackson’s
“Thriller,” from Matthew Sweet’s Japanimation for “Girlfriend” to
90

Metropolis appears on Be-Bop Deluxe’s Live! In the Air Age; Roger
Dean’s othenvorhUy structures provided the cover for Asia’s
Pyramid; popular UK artist Les Edwards shows an unsettling
image of the future on Legs Diamond’s The Wish; Roger Dean
supplied the alien landscape for Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman,
and Howe, an album by former members of the band Yes.

Ahnold ’n Roses’ T2 outtake, “You Should be Mine.” Attempts at full-
length SF musicals— with the exception of the ever-popular Rocky
Honor Picture Shoiv— have been less successful. Take, for exam-
ple, Streets of Fire, with music by Meat Loaf writer/producer Jim
Steinman...please.

If much of the explicit imagery that rock and SF borrow from each
other is superficial, maybe it goes back to what I said at the beginning
about SF as a literature of ideas, and rock as a music of the body.
Maybe the real lesson here is that genres profit less from stealing
from each other than they do when they listen and leam from each
other. When SF gains the energy and drive and innovation that the
best of rock has, and when rock is played with heart and thought and
imagination, then we truly have the best of both universes. □

Games

By Jeremy Bloom

SF gamers are getting ready
for an exciting new dimension.

ABOVE: We're not
quite there yet, but
the newest
generation of games
is the closest we’ve
come to plugging
directly into our
computers. Art by
Barclay Shaw.
INSET: NuVision’s
3-D Spex promise to
put you in the
action.

W HERE WOULD SCIENCE FICTION BE WITHOUT
gadgets? In fact, science fiction is really a
misnomer — it's the application of science
that gives us the gee-whiz stuff. Perhaps it
should be called “tech-fic,” in honor of the gadgets, the
toys, and the tools. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas is an annual silicon orgy dedicated to all of the
above. And it’s the must-be place for eveiy company, from
around the world, that is taking a chunk
of new, cutting-edge technology and
shepherding it across the barrier that
divides last year’s science fiction from
next year’s mall-rat gotta-have product
AH the big boys are there: Phillips,
showing off their new picture-phones
(the Internet phone seems to have
finally lit a fire under the telcom folks;
looks like this will be the year that
video-telephony finally hits); all the
video companies showing off the hot

new DVD systems (a new CD/videodisk standard that fit ;
seven times as much info onto a standard-sized CD; they’l
be available for PCs late tliis year, and you can just intag
ine what that’s going to do for gaming: Seven times the
music! Seven times the graphics! Seven times the detail,
the levels, tire cinematography...)

Just a few years ago, games were a big part of the CES
until they became too big, and got a show of their own.
But there are still some things for the die-hard gamer to
get excited about here.

In a comer of one of t he huge convention halls the
folks from NuVision demo’ed their 3-D SPEX (Slogan:
“Wicked 3-D realism like nothing you’ve ever been
into.”). If your only experience of 3-D is those obnox-
ious red/hlue cellophane-and-paper glasses that
allowed “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and
“It Came from Outer Space” to make your parents
nauseous, then it’s time to get with the program,
amigo. Today’s 3-D is nothing like mom and dad’s.

A quick physiological digression — how we see:
We are blessed with what is called binocular vision
(meaning “two eyes”). Our brain takes the two
slightly different world-views that we get from our
two separate eyes and combines them into one pic-
ture. But the closer an object is to your eyes, the
greater the differences between the two images.
Our brain uses those differences (“parallax”) to tell
what is closer and what is farther away. That’s why,
no matter how well-rendered an image on a screen
is, your eyes will never see it as anything more
than a 2-D picture, because both eyes see the same
image, and the same background. But if you could
somehow show a separate image to each eye . . .
you would have 3-D the natural way.

VR headsets (like the $500 1-Glasses from Virtual i-O)
work that way: Each eye has its own screen. Very cool; but
two mini-TVs cost big bucks, not to mention the weight.
Enter liquid crystal technology. Take a simple, lightweight
pair of glasses, and make the lenses out of liquid crystal
(LCDs). Sit down in front of your PC, and plug in a slightly
modified game — in this case Interplay’s Descent II. Instead
of sending one picture to your computer’s monitor, the
modified game sends a pair — one foryour left eye, one for
your right Not at the same time, of course; it alternates. A

signal tells those LCDs to go alternately dark and clear

left, right, left, right Too fast for you to
see (unless you have an older, slower
system. Your monitor should run at
90hz or better, or you get a little
flicker).

And your brain sees 3-D. It really
works, by God! The enemy ships seem
to float in the air in front of you; corri-
dors really stretch into the distance;
and bullets and missiles fly down them!
Well ... they do if you have a fast
enough machine. These units are com-

The Answers to Life’s Questions
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COLLECTIBLE SF/FANTASY/HARDBOUND

books, new & used (catalogue $1 .00).
Collections purchased. Joseph
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I 465-6532. MC & VISA accepted.

mg out now because of the power involved;
they need the fast CPUs and graphics cards
that have come out in the past couple of years.
You can rim on a 486, and it is still very cool,

it’s just kind of slow. But they recommend a P-
100, and one of the new “3-D” accelerator
video cards (particularly the Canopus
Total3D).

As for your 3-D shades, there are tliree ruqjor
systems available: The 3-D SPEX ($99 or less),
and their competitors — Simuleyes (from
Stereographies, $170 or less) and VRsurfer
(above, from VRex, $99 or less). All work on
the same principals, although VRex is wireless
(using an infrared signal instead of a cable)
and 3-D SPEX use a patented pi-cell LCD sys-

tem for a faster refresh rate (faster=better). All
run the same games, too — the game devel-
opers have patches available to allow the
glasses to be used with Descent II, Whiplash,
Wolfenstein 3D, Slipstream. 5000, and others
are in development.

One problem with surfing on the cutting
edge: that which is new and cool is not always
that which is well thought out and/or fully
developed. A good example is the very cool,
but not-quite-there-yet MindDnve (from The
Other 90% Technologies Inc, $149). The
premise here: Control your PC directly using

thought waves! Is that cool, or what? Alas, in
the execution, it’s still just lukewarm. Insert
your finger in the controller, and it reads your
left-brain/right-brainwave patterns.

“Different mental activities — remembering .
relaxing, analyzing, positive and negative
thoughts, left and right brain functions — all
generate different bio-electrical patterns,” say:-
the manual. But the actual execution is a little ■
vague. Eveiyone who told me “It takes prac-
tice, but you can make it work,” was selling the
system. Of the several tester's who fried it for
us, none could get any sense of contr ol out of
the various software packages "Mindskier
(control your descent down a ski-run by dunk-
ing “left” and “right”), MindFlight, MindDoo-
dle (a drawing program). Once you do get a
semblance of control, you’re left widr a game
that is at about 1985’s level of complexity.

20M

MlU G^ME
LO/ICl G^JWEL...
WUL'ppL.dVEft...

Opf IOWS...

CHOUSE piLOpS...
VIEW REMO...

HIGH SCORES

CREbir*

OUIT

Good effort, but save your money till they get
it right.

And on the truly “gee-whiz” frontier: IBM
was showing off a concept drat is still several
year’s from reality: tire Personal Area Network
(PAN). The human skin can conduct an elec-
trical signal. Just a very tiny voltage — not
enough to shock you, but enough to convey
data. With a sender/receiver unit in your
pocket, you can shake hands and automati-
cally exchange business cards . . . touch the
telephone and it reads your credit card num-

ber . . . touch your PC and download all the
business cards you picked up at the conven-
tion ....

I’m sure you’re already getting ideas your-
self. — “It may look like a group hug at the
beginning of the meeting, but actually they
were all just exchanging notes....” One tiring
they’re working on real hal'd is secirrity, so you
don’t have a guy bumping into you at the air-
port and getting all your credit card info.

But imagine tire gaming possibilities! Multi-
player games, and when you touch tire joystick
tire computer reads the module in your pocket
and knows who is playing . . . touchpads tat-
tooed on your skin ... tire mind boggles.

Technology. You gotta love it. □

WMES_

Continued from pane ®

‘//ere.'” ,

u lHe Elders? That s great.

Ethan York moved toward her.

‘M a bit farther,' ’she said. Ctew

Shuman took one step, and anotto.

rewtlsion^t the hnage .^n^Ethan York? No.

^called out to him, heedless of those
others who listened and watched near y.

•Bta York, wait' Dm ’ 1 9 ° “ s/ort ^

• rt “r/’c n /raw Ethan York. Go back.

mg Th«^edinalarm.“Mi?W» t - S
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turn him from the path, send him back to his

bead vessel, send him away.

-TahyouvdllbeendeA warning,

.^rcal^to^e human. ‘0,

golden fragrance of ripe blos-
soms permeated the m * ^ , N<m -

“ G DmTbcfooZl: He put out. a hand.

“Yes."

1 ‘Oh, Tali, Hove yon!’

I r.rs“S- - -

2 s»SE=E

I good loving. shimmering and

I Therocksand^we^med their true

I forms, S green crests held high, beaks snap-

I ^"^eserved. You’re forgiven.

t0r _^ Then we will deal with them as well.

- This is no '“"^^^Sdedto

reward yom Your mating will be advanced. It

will take place this very md his
hungry nightfeeders.

—Come back with us to the nest, daughter.

They were gone. She was alone with the
Ethan York’s husk.

Q,m thought of all that the human

thfdS where the silver vessel waited.

ItS »&oved his hands Just so
an"d here. She made two hands and

di ldmk^ac d e°opened in theskin of the ves-
sel “peered in. Flickering lights swirled

inside like miniature sums.
tv,o head’s name, what had lie caneu

sErtSAnu

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reflection in the mi human with

looking specimen The

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insignia on his suveijr

York, Lt. Cmdr. his nest

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with him’ Yes, she w "fe„o biaC ity,

3IEr=“r»

“SsSSL-

The door dosed. The s g crawled

0f n W 1fZge "oft webbing enclosed

into it and a stran„ , ffll t n e trern-

her. A roaring sound lb iegan ‘ hea vy,
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head's wallha^mebt^^p

She gazed om ttamign ^ begin .

nhig ht growTa^er 1 On one of those lights

““JSS 1 -™--"

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BOOKS

Continued from page 19

have no reason to suspect the solar system
they land in to be home to aliens, but they fol-
low all the rules: cloak as soon as possible
after warp is complete, send robot probes,
scan for communication.

They don’t detect the cloaked aliens who
are watching them, and they certainly don’t
expect to discover four habitable planets and
more orbital and other activity than even
Terra has. And the last tiling they expect is for
the aliens to immediately start shooting. The
survey ships manage to fight their way back
through the warp point, and the aliens follow
them. The aliens don't stop until innocent
planet Golan-A needs evacuating. And then
Erebor, a planet around yet another star, is
threatened and attacked. This time commu-
nications last long enough for us to finally get
a glimpse of the enemy: huge, eight-limbed,
hairy monsters that eat people, which are
nicknamed Bugs.

The humans, though faster and better
equipped, have neither the personnel or the
equipment ready. For the most part the last
sixty years or so have been peaceful. Though
the Federation has factions — the needs of the
heart worlds differ greatly from the fringe
worlds, and the corporations have a yet

another voice — generally peo- moo
pie live their lives — long ones ^ |

thanks to antigenome technol-
ogy — pretty much as they
choose. Pretty much the way
we live oiu' lives.

Weber and White have a
huge cast. Rear Admiral
Vanessa Murakuma is red-
haired and petite but full of
strategic cunning. Her fight-
ing determination and her
feeling of responsibility for
the defenseless civilians
tears her up with guilt that
nearly breaks her spirit as the war itself nearly
breaks her physically. Her right-hand man,
and old flame, Marcus LeBlanc, is my favorite
character. He’s an intelligence officer and a
writer of a science fictional novel. He’ll bring
the same creative thinking that went into writ-
ing a novel about the horrors of humans
transmogrified by cybernetics into fighting a
war with an unknown enemy.

Hannah Avram is Sky Marshal, while the
brilliant and highly respected former Sky
Marshall Ivan Antonov is brought out of
retirement to be on the allied war council,
along with First Fang Kthaara of the Orion,
and other alien representatives. Though
humans hold the technological edge, each
ally has a unique strength and each ally

BDQK5 TO IllHTCH FDR

Starship Troopers, by
Robert A. Heinlein (Ace). To
many, this is the best novel by
the Dean of modern science
fiction.This is perhaps the per-
fect time to reread it or pick it
up for the first time — you’ll
want to be prepared for Paul
Verhoeven’s film adaptation,
due out at Thanksgiving.

Arthur C. Clarke: A Critical
Companion, by Robin Anne Reid (Green-
wood Press). This is the year 2001’s creator
turns eighty (and celebrates it with 3001 —
see our lead book review). Discover a life
that changed the face of science fiction —
and the face of the planet as well.

Evenings with Demons: Stories from
Thirty Years, by Whitley Streiber (Border-
lands Press). In Communion and Trans-
formation, he told you that aliens were real.
Now, dip into the cream of the crop of short
fiction from one writer’s fascinating and
controversial career.

Return of the Dinosaurs,
edited by Mike Resnick and
Martin H. Greenberg (DAW).

Maureen F. McHugh, Esther
Friesner, Gene Wolfe, David
Gerrold, and others tell us
what really killed the dinosaurs
in this entertaining collection.

Leonard Ninioy’s Primor-
tals, by Steve Perry (Warner
Aspect). Mr. Spock’s alter ego
created a cosmic SF concept
for Big Entertainment’s comic
book line. Too large an idea to
be contained in a comic, it’s
burst forth to a novel, telling
the tale of Earth’s original
inhabitants, who are now
heading home.

The Best of Interzone, edited by
David Pringle (St. Martin’s). This Hugo
winning UK magazine presents the cream
of its crop, including stories by Stephen
Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Brian Aldiss,
Thomas M. Disch and many others.

Edgeworks III, by Harlan Ellison
(White Wolf). The 20 volume series of the
collected works of this award-winning
master continue with the compilation of
The Harlan Ellison Hornbook and Harlan
Ellison’s Movie, previously available only
as a limited edition.

Bug Park, by James P. Hogan
(Baen). This author of the well-
received novel The Proteus
Operation brings forth his latest
Hard SF thriller, tackling minia-
turized robotics and nanotech-
nology, with a touch of indus-
trial espionage as well.

« A B , • understands the threa the
R c ° c k Bugs hold to them. The 1 are
. eager to fight.

Fang Zhaamak . Rayr lond
Prescott, Ellen MacGregor ...
the list of characters goe ; on.
The war sweeps through
many star systems, and a* old
warriors go down fight mg,
new ones swing up to tike
their place. Weber and White
have created a huge cam as.
They have clearly spent a lo of
time planning the battles ; nd
imagining fleets. What type of
ships would a Space Navy have? How would
they be manned? What types of weapons a id
communications? There are superdread-
noughts, battle cruisers, and pinnaces and
many others in a range of classes. The Fedi r-
ation quickly labels the Bug stops loo, fee i\\
Cataphracts, to Archers, lo Avalanches, and so
on. Likewise, the weapons systems are well-
thought-out, everything from SBMHAWKS to
AMBAMS. Frankly it was a relief when a plain
old missile was launched.

Weber and White treat the usual aspects of
a starfaring universe with great care. They
explain the ability to travel star to star — the
warp points — and the communications
They even toss in an explanation for why this
isn’t a more "cybernetic” world. They really
do a tremendous job of setting up a science
fiction universe that isn’t science fantasy.
Well, OK, one of the alien allies does has a
form of telepathy! But generally, this is seri-
ous, military science fiction.

This novel, though over 600 pages long, ends
with only a pause in the battle. I fully expect
the authors to have another volume where we
learn more about the Bugs and the battles.

Rachel Russell

RECENT AND RECOMMENDED

Some stories vanish as soon as one has fin-
ished reading them; others live on forever.
Tales such as Harlan Ellison’s ‘“Repent Har-
lequin!’ said the Ticktockman” and Frederik
Pohl’s “Day Million” form the peaks of the
field; they are the Everests towards which all
other writers must aspire. Three decades ago,
Michael Moorcock wroteone such tale, a rev-
olutionary story of time travel and religion
that won the 1967 Nebula Award for Best
Novella. Now, Moorcock’s story has been
handsomely reprinted as BehoUl the Man: the
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (Mojo Press,
140 pages, hardcover, $12.95). Karl Glogauer’s
jaunt through the ages in search of the his-
torical Christ yields a sense of wonder as dan-
gerous as that which earned Salman Rushdie
a fatwa. Those who only know Behold the
Man in its subsequent novel incarnation
should still hunt this volume out, for they will
find the original version tire better one, as is
true with most such cases of expansion. Illus-
trated by John Picacio, with an introduction
by Jonathan Can-oil. Check out http://www.
eden.com/comics/mojo.html for more info. □

SCIENCE

Continued from page 35

found at our South Pole — such as a platinum
mine — tilings would have been different.

LANDIS: Argentina, I believe, claims parts
of Antarctica — but everybody ignores them.

SF AGE: So you don’t tliink any of that will
cany over?

ANDREWS: Why should it? Anybody with
a ticket can get to Antarctica. The Moon,
when occupied by a nation or a corporation
that utilizes its resources, will de facto
become the property of that group. My take
was on the Lunar Prospector — if we locate
the ice within kilometers, keep the info to
ourselves, as long as we can. The crater is
twice the size of Puerto Rico, so that’s not too

Close a coordinat e Tor the site.

SF AGE: So has this discoveiy interested
anyone in sending people back there?

LANDIS: The south pole of the moon
would be a veiy odd place to walk around, if
you were an astronaut. The sun never gets
more than one-and-a-half degrees above the
horizon. And, of course, in the cold trap, it’s
permanently dark. But even over the rest of
the surface, the low sun angle means that
most of the surface will be in shadow —
astronauts would never be able to see their
feet! My suggestion is that astronauts will
carry huge mirrors on poles, to reflect light
downwards so that they can see where
ihey’re walking!

ANDREWS: Geoff — love it! Sounds
Gemsbackian. That’s a perfect spot for a gen-
erating plant, isn’t it, Geoff? Pump sunlight
down from a peak via mirrors or through
electric lines, melt what you want and use it.

SF AGE: So you really think that whoever
has the biggest gun has a moral right to the
Moon, Arlan?

ANDREWS: Not the biggest gun, just the
first one. Let me bring up another point. First
there should be a totally scientific evaluation
of that ice. It might cany ancient secrets —
other debris, bacteria, etc. — that should be
studied before it is all destroyed.

LANDIS: Probably not. No more than frost
in your backyard would cany debris from the
ocean that the water evaporated from. How-
ever, isotope ratios might tell us something
about the nature and age of the comets that
brought the water to the Moon.

ANDREWS: If it was condensate, it would
be pure, but who can say what kinds of stuff
might be imbedded, should it be from a
direct impact?

LANDIS: The impacts didn’t necessarily
happen anywhere nearby where the ice is.

ANDREWS: Anyway — scientific evalua-
tion first, then industrial exploitation. It is
interesting that Japan has announced that
Nissan Motor corporation, among others, is
interested in sponsoring a manned return to
tlie Moon in the early 21st Century.

LANDIS: Ice is rocket fuel ore. And in
space, rocket fuel is everything. Nevertheless,

some of the moon-colony advocates, such as
Peter Kokh, advocate not using the ice for
rocket fuel.

ANDREWS: Why is that, Geoff?

LANDIS: It’s a question of how much there
is. All that the Clementine mission admits to
finding is the equivalent of two foot-ball fields
worth, 25 feet deep. Now, that’s 200,000 tons
of ice! But if you bum it as rocket fuel, it’s
gone. Kokh says, hey, we should hang on to
this ice, and use it to ran a lunar colony. You
can drink it, breath it, grow plants with it. And
when you recycle it, it lasts.

ANDREWS: Geoff, but if we find more
among the other regions of that Puerto Rico-
sized crater, that argument might be invali-
dated.

LANDIS: Right, Arlan. Something that Stu-
art Nozette pointed out to me last month is
that since the radar receiver is on the Earth,
you don’t actually get radar returns from the
deepest parts of the craters. Most of the ice
may not even have been seen, only the ice in
comparatively shallow craters. So it might not
be necessary to conserve.

ANDREWS: All in all, lunar ice means that
it will be cheaper to establish manned lunar
colonies, at least the first ones. Ice is just the
first of many surprises that tire Moon has lor
us, I am confident.

LANDIS: Well, I don’t agree with Kokh. I
flunk that if we can use lunar ice to get us out
into the rest of the solar system, that’s a fitting
use for it. There’s ice on Mars, on the moons
of Mars, in asteroids, even on the poles of
Mercury. Once we get established, we have
all tire rocket fuel we can use.

ANDREWS: I agree with Geoff — once
we’re out there, we can grab other ice; don’t
limit our flunking up front. The Moon is a very
convenient place that has enabled us to prac-
tice space travel before venturing into seri-
ous space. It is also fortunate in that it may
provide us with many of the elements we
need for further exploration. One might want
to ask: Is this providential or Providential?

LANDIS: The great race at the beginning
of the 20th century was the race to the south
pole of the Earth. How fitting if the great race
of the 21st is to the south pole of the moon!
ANDREWS: The Cold Rush is on! □

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Internet

(Episode 1 l .\ >' i )

takes to kill
it annotates

X-Files secrets, sci-fi toys,
monster masks and more.

N ext time you’re cybersurf-
ing the World Wide Web, here
are some of our favorite rest
stops along the Information
Superhighway.

http://www.cUcket.eom/clicket/somask/s
omask.html Clicket sells media memorabilia:
badges, toys, artwork, costumes and masks.
Oy, such masks. Paramount has licensed a line
of “Deluxe” Star • Trek latex masks (you can
even get one for that alien tiling that looks like
an albino gorilla with a horn in the middle of
its forehead) that are so egregiously ugly that
they come all the way around to beautiful. Pic-
ture William Shatner with even more chins

than he has in real life, rendered in pink-crayon
fleshtones. The effect is heightened by the deli-
cious baby-spit green that the site’s authors
have chosen for the background. Don’t miss
the ID4 “Oversized Exoskeleton Mask."

http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hyper-
text/faq/usenet/music/sci-fi-reefs/faq.html
There are about ten zillion songs that make sci-
ence-fiction references, and they’re all here,
organized by artist. Did you know that the Jazz
Butcher wrote a song about Harlan Ellison?

h ttp://204. 9 7. 92 . 3/~ brickman/sfpr ogs . lit
ml Ambit Science Fiction TV provides listings
of cable and broadcast SF television for the
next ten days, including VCR+ codes. The site
is updated weekly.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/sci-
ence_fictioiiAvarofworlds.html Remember
how your English teacher would use moun-
tains of “insightful” questions as an altar on
which to sacrifice any pleasure you took in
whatever book you were studying? Well, if
you’re feeling nostalgic, crack a copy of die
Study Guide for H.G. Wells War of
he Worlds, fire up your browser,
uid prepare to be numbed!

http://www.geocities.com/
SapeCanaveral/9815/OK, so Mul-
ler and Sculley are investigating a
leath — the CEO of an electronics
ompany has been electrocuted by

a computer-gone-berserV

Wanna know if it’s plausible? Wanna
exactly how much electricity it takes
someone?

the science in eveiy episode
http://pages.map.com/~amyshea
hoeck.html With Star Wars back in the
aters, Star Wars scams are back
This page, part of the Star
is an account of a ripoff artist who
rare, collectible Star Wars toys on the
and tiie poor people who spent hundreds
dollars for what turned out to be the new,
cheapie figures on display at the local Wal-Mart
A cautionary tale for this age, to be sure.

httpyAnviv.paiiix.eom/~gokce/sf_defn.h t
ml “What’s in a name?” A funny, strange ant i
thought-provoking collection of definitions o f
the term “Science Fiction,” from writers
fans, and pundits.

http://www.en.com/users/roach/teambig
wheel.html This beautiful, nostalgic site is a
graphic tour through the toy-fetishes of
designer Brian Roach. Childish and lovely, it
perfectly captures the thrill of tearing the
shrinkwrap off a sexy new Steve Austin doll
and sniffing the chemical, new-toy-smell that
his injection-molded body exuded.

httpy/ivivw.pythonline. com/
Monty Python's Web site is wild,
chock full of doivnloadables: anima-
tion, video, music, text Lots of
surprises for the casual
too. “Spam, spam,
spam, spam, spam.”

Cory Doctorow

Sci-Fi * Comics * Art
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Clive Barker

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The Wizard of Speed and Time

Fred Olen Ray

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Doug Bradley

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Peter David

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^ ^ The Catherine'

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